My Very Worst Roommate was also my best friend from high school. I was a pretty sheltered and passive person, so I attracted controlling personalities. She had one for sure. She had a pretty messed up family, but I didn’t know the half of it until we moved in together. We moved into a pretty nice dorm room that had its own bathroom. She had family in the area, so she got there early and claimed all the space she wanted. There were two wardrobes but only one dresser, so she took the entire dresser. She had her entire half of the room decorated by the time I arrived.

None of this was too bad, but I also discovered that she only showered about once a week. She did not shave the tops of her feet, so there was a huge patch of hair there. She had this really long, really thick hair that really did only need to be washed about once a week, but she didn’t take a shower unless she was washing her hair. She would let it get to the point where her hair was itchy and smelly. If she wore makeup one day or evening, she would just wipe it off with a washcloth (liquid foundation).

As I said, she had a very controlling personality. She thought it was OK for her to have a boyfriend, but not me because then I wasn’t available to meet her every need. She told my mom that my boyfriend hit me (he didn’t). She complained endlessly about my boyfriend (who’s now my husband) to our other friends, my mom, her mom, her boyfriend and really anyone who would listen. Before I met my boyfriend, she set me up with this weird friend of her boyfriend’s who had been utterly destroyed by his previous break-up. Also, she had a tendency to only date guys of a different religious persuasion than she was. Two examples were the Mormon and the Jehovah’s Witness dudes she dated. She disagreed with both religions and tried to get both of them to promise they would quit those religions.

We lived together for one year and then I moved in with another high school friend who was also pretty damaged, but by then, I was mostly living with my boyfriend so it didn’t matter. I never had a roommate again!

I met K in our first year at university. We were both doing the same subjects and, after a night out with her and her boyfriend, I quickly became close mates with her boyfriend’s friends. As such, I started seeing a lot more of her.

Cut to nine months later and I was dating a friend of her boyfriend. K, her boyfriend, myself and my boyfriend found a cheap house to share and all moved in together. K was very intense. She wanted to know where I was at all hours of the day–if I missed a class she would call me non-stop for an explanation. Then she started “Single White Femal-ing” me. She cut her very long blonde hair the same as mine – very short and dark. She’d “borrow” my clothes all the time. She’d mimic my accent.

Suddenly my boyfriend started avoiding home. We both had part-time jobs to supplement university and he would get home much earlier than me. He started going to the local pub and waiting there until I finished work. When I asked him why, he confessed that he found her “creepy.” I stupidly thought he just didn’t like her.

Then one night I came home late, and was standing outside our house on my phone so as not to disturb my roommates. As I stood outside I watched through the front windows as K came downstairs to find my boyfriend asleep on the couch, sat next to him, slowly crept closer to him, rested her head on his shoulder, put her arm around him, and eventually lay right on top of him, as he snored through the whole thing. When I went inside and asked what she was doing, she pretended to have just woken up and claimed they fell asleep watching TV together–despite the fact I watched the whole thing!

My boyfriend and I moved out a month later, after her she stepped up her campaign to “get” him. As a post script, after he and I split up she claimed she had cheated with him a few weeks previously. Sadly that lie ruined only her own relationship, and my ex, her ex and I remain very good friends to this day.

A was randomly assigned to me in my freshman year of college, and I could tell on the very first day of school that we were not going to be best buddies.

As I began to settle into a group of friends, MVWR usually tagged along with us wherever we went, generally alienating everyone in the group with backhanded insults. For example, my friend K mentioned that she was considering rushing a sorority, and A asked, “So you can be, like, a dumb sorority girl?” in a valley girl voice.  She also asked awkward questions, like whether we thought sex outside of missionary position was sinful. Whenever someone said “fuck you” to anyone, she would respond with, “Right here, on the table?”

One night about a week into school we hung out and drank in a guy friend’s dorm room. I left early, and A ended up staying the night. When A arrived the next morning, she looked as though she’d been strangled. Her neck was covered in about 30 hickeys, which she had received from our friend’s roommate, who’d been passed out drunk when I left.  The guy later reported that at some point during the make-out session she told him, “I think I’ve just been bitten by a vampire!”

All of her weirdness might have been tolerable, had it not been for the smell in our room. A loved to eat salmon-flavored cream cheese, which she would spread on crackers with the same crusty knife that she never washed. The knife would sit out on a cardboard box that she used as a table, which was also covered in crusty salmon dip and made the whole room smell like fish. The smell was so bad that my friends refused to hang out in my room at all. To counter the stench, I went out and bought some air freshener.

One day, I came into the room and was met with a particularly pungent odor, so I sprayed some air freshener, and A poked her head out of her loft bed and looked at me like I’d just killed a puppy. About 20 minutes later she posted a note on Facebook titled “Air Freshener,” which never specifically mentioned me, but discussed how she generally felt unwanted (I’ll admit that by this point I had stopped inviting her to hang out with my friends and me), and friends posted comments saying things like “Don’t let her get to you!” To this day I have no idea why my spraying air freshener was so offensive to her. It was a very long rest of the year after that incident.

My Very Worst Roommate just moved out today, but is inexplicably still sitting in my living room, causing me to delay celebrating that she’s finally going to be (somewhat) out of my life. Almost four years ago, I met my girlfriend, and her best friend, MVWR.  Our relationship was budding, things were going well, we were about to move in together when MVWR broke up with her significant other and needed a place to stay. She moved in with my girlfriend and I shortly followed. She was schizophrenic, didn’t pay rent on time, once “fixed” my car by causing $2,300 worth of damage by changing a fuse incorrectly and in general drove me crazy. She met someone new and moved in with them a few months later. A year and a half later and single once again, MVWR once again needed a place to stay. When we had previously lived together, we were three adults and a child living in a small two-bedroom apartment, so I chalked the previous experience up to the small quarters and wanting our privacy and tried again.

We had a huge house and our roommate at the time had just moved out, so, in MVWR moved once again. We gave her a major break on the rent because she was on SSI and couldn’t work because of her craziness and she was supposedly going to help us out with renovations on the home. She never paid rent on time, stopped helping with the cleaning after five months, went through a series of jobs and once used the rent money she wasn’t paying us to buy a bag of pot and a Wii. She was constantly making up stories, not remembering what actually happened (like claiming I had told her it was okay for her to spend rent money on pot and a Wii) and constantly borrowed everyone else’s car since she didn’t have one (at one point, she caused a huge dent/scratch in mine that still hasn’t been repaired).

She thought she was smart, but was a complete immature, selfish, idiotic asshole with no common courtesy. The voices she heard were even creepier, but she’d usually just hide in her bedroom. The bedroom was a place she spent a lot of time, with all the various people she was dating that she’d bring over and expose our daughter too, only to have them dump her when she told them of her diagnosis. I wanted her to move out long ago, but my girlfriend feels an obligation to her.  MVWR was finally looking for a new place when the last straw came a month and a half ago.

During one of her schizophrenic breaks, she tried to choke my girlfriend – her best friend – with a pool cue. She went to the psych ward and was completely unaware that any of it happened.  Somehow, she convinced them to discharge them three days later, and while she was supposed to go to a halfway house for a transition, she instead chose to come straight home. Thankfully, she found a new apartment. If only it wasn’t just four blocks away, with my expensive comforter and various other belongings sitting in it. And if only, when she just left, she hadn’t said, “See you tomorrow.”

My Very Worst Roommate was a frat boy. We got along at first and there was a little flirting, but nothing once the semester started. He secretly harbored a grudge after he realized I wasn’t going to date him. Things appeared cool and we still hung out. A month or so into the semester I started dating a guy. I had been going to most of MVWR’s frat’s parties for the last two years with my sorority sisters, and I told them beforehand I was coming to the party on this given night. His brothers blocked me at the door and refused to let me in. When I confronted MVWR later and asked why, he started ranting about how I was always disrespecting him. I was confused, and he wouldn’t give any further explanation. Civility ended.

MVWR would sulk any time I had male friends over, sitting on the couch and pointedly not looking at or talking to us, and grunting at them when they said hi. He would cut his hair and leave the remains (which looked like pubic hair) all over the sink, floor, and bathtub in the only bathroom in the house. He let his dishes pile up all week and started using mine when his were dirty. His method of cleaning was shoving everything under the couch. The smell of beer permeated the downstairs.

A few months later I was dating a new guy. He came over one evening and MVWR noticed. The next morning I came downstairs to find that one of MVWR’s glasses had fallen off the drying rack and shattered. I cut my foot on the glass shards and went back to my room to clean the cut. Shortly after, he demanded to know why I broke his glass, called me a liar when I told him it was there when I went downstairs, told me I’m always disrespecting him, and started waving a roll of computer cable in my face. I knew he had gotten violent with his mother recently, so I was afraid he’d get violent with me.

I waited until he left, then fled to my mother’s house, begging her to let me move home. A few days later I came back with my boyfriend and part of his fire brigade to move everything out safely. I never got my portion of the security deposit back even though we weren’t charged for any damage.

My best friend and I should’ve never moved in together. I ended up being in charge of cleaning everything because she wouldn’t and I’m a clean freak. She would buy tons of groceries and bring leftovers home from her parents and then they would sit in the fridge for months and months, eventually spoiling. I ended up being the one to have to clean the fridge out after asking her to multiple times.  She would leave dirty cups and bowls in her room until I went in to get them out because I realized half our dishes were missing. After that I made a habit of going in her room every so often to clean it out. She would also get fast food and put the trash in the bag in came it and leave that in her room for months.

She worked in the food industry and after she got home she would just take her clothes off that she worked in and leave them on the floor until every single uniform she owned was on the floor and then she’d consider washing them. I always just made sure to keep the door to her room shut when we had company because it was so disgusting and smelled awful. She bounced rent checks at least three times. All of the bills and utilities were in my name, so every month I would pay them and she would reimburse me for her half. The first few months she was on time but then she started getting later and later with them. I told her that I needed the money by the day the bill was due because I was paying for the bills in full out of my pocket until she paid me for her half and I couldn’t really afford it.  She still never really got the money to me on time.

The final straw? I bought some new shoes for a specific event that I was going to and stuck them in my closet. The night of the event I could not find them anywhere. I texted my roommate asking if she had borrowed them (we are different clothes sizes and shoe sizes so this was uncommon).  She texted me back saying she had not borrowed or seen them. A few weeks later I was in my closet, and there were the shoes I had been looking for before, but they had definitely been worn!  I was fuming and I didn’t even know what to say to her. I did end up confronting her about it and she just shrugged it off, saying that she was just embarrassed that she had taken them and she didn’t know they were new so she felt bad for wearing them. Eventually, she moved out, but since it was before me, I was the one left to clean everything. Her farewell present to me was a huge stain on her bathroom counter that took me half a can of Comet and hours of scrubbing to get out.

As a 22 year-old college senior, I had to give up the sweet one-bedroom apartment I had all to myself so I could quit my part-time job and blitz out my very last semester. I was driving around different apartment complexes near my university; at one that I liked, I spotted a tenant throwing trash in the dumspter, and rolled down my window to ask her where the leasing office was. She approached me and responded in a howlingly loud voice, “EETZ RIIIIGHT OVAH THEEEEEEEAH. DO YOU WAAANT TO MOOOVE HEEEAH AND BE MY ROOOOOOOM MAAAAATE?” Turns out, Svetka was a 32-year old community college student who was here from the Netherlands, studying herbology, operating on a theory that people could survive by ingesting only herbal supplements instead of eating actual food. She told me all this in the first 10 minutes of our meeting. And I agreed to move in with her anyway.

I soon found out that the herbal supplement-only diet wasn’t cutting it; about once every two weeks, Svetka would stop at the Burger King drive-through, order one of everything on the menu and bring it all home to eat over a period of three or four days. This meant rotting, nasty burgers and fries laying out on our kitchen counters, accumulating flies and ants; she would still eat all of it. Our kitchen smelled like grease and bad gas the entire time I lived there. She looked like the blonde girl from ABBA and carried a picture of ABBA in her wallet at all times. Her opening remarks to most new acquaintances was: “DOOONT YOO THIIIIINK I LOOOOOK LIKE ABBA?” Instead of staying in her own room to talk to her family back home in the middle of the night, she chose to roam the hall in front of my bedroom to talk loudly and even shout sometimes.

Most disturbingly, Svetka asked me for “relationship” advice all the time about her infatuation with a bartender in our town, who had a live-in girlfriend and showed no interest in her whatsoever. When I told her it sounded like she was wasting her time, she would literally pretend I hadn’t said anything and would ask me the question again. To attract his attention, she bought “naughty bunny”-themed lingerie and wore it to the bar on Halloween. With no clothes over it. She kissed a random stranger at the bar in an attempt to make him jealous; the stranger had a bad cold sore, and Svetka caught herpes from him. Then, one school night, I was woken up by the sound outside my bedroom door of someone dragging something heavy across the floor. I didn’t want to deal with whatever Svetka was doing at that moment and went back to bed. I awoke the next day to hear a man talking on the balcony that connected Svetka’s and my rooms. I eavesdropped enough to hear that it was the bartender, telling someone on his cell phone that he was unsure how he had gotten to Svetka’s apartment, that his head felt groggy. Svetka had apparently somehow drugged him at the bar and kidnapped him at our apartment!

The second my lease was up, I bolted from that apartment, passive-aggressively leaving most of my horribly tacky and heavy furniture for Svetka to deal with. I found out via e-mail about three months later that she had been deported for violating the terms of her visa.

I had been living with my best friend Colleen for about six months. The only problem was that she was a heavy drinker and I only drank from time to time. She would have loud parties, but usually only while I was at work, so it never really bothered me too much. And she always cleaned up after herself.

This night though, was different. I worked as a waitress and on this Friday I had just finished up working a 13 hour shift. I arrived home around 3AM to a crowd of people in my house. One of her friends turned around and saw me come in and exclaimed a loud hello in her excitement to see me. Colleen was around the corner and when she heard my name she was so startled she jumped up and spilled her beer on the counter top. She ran out of the kitchen and flew past me down the hall to where our bedrooms were. She started knocking on my bedroom door.

“Get out of the room guys.  Come on guys, get out the room,” she said.

Slowly, I headed down the hall. I was tired and not in the mood to make a scene in front of all of her drunk friends. Quietly, I asked her what was going on and who was in my room. I tried the door, but it was locked. I could feel my face getting hot. Now I was mad. I started banging on my bedroom door.

“Get out of my room, right now!” I screamed.

After about 30 seconds I could hear someone very quietly respond that they couldn’t find their shoes. After about a minute and a half of fumbling with the lock and young woman emerged from my bedroom with her supposed boyfriend. I had never seen either one of them before in my life. They came right out of my room and went straight into Colleen’s room which, of course, was unoccupied. The girl sat on the bed and started to cry.

I went in my room and plugged the light back in which had somehow gotten knocked out of the wall and changed out of my work clothes. Then I got to the rest of the party guests. I told them all rather loudly to please get out of my home because I worked a long day and wanted some peace and quiet.  I let one person stay but only because she was way to drunk to drive. After everyone had gone I just stared at Colleen for a minute. After thinking about it for a few minutes I decided I would go stay at my boyfriends for the night.

“You just kicked all my friends out and now you’re leaving?” she asked in a cocky way.

“Yes, Colleen, I’m leaving.  And I kicked them all out because I wanted to make sure no one else would be having sex in my bed while I’m not here,” I said.

The next day she offered no apology. She blamed everything on the fact that she was too drunk and barely remembered anything. She also had no explanation as to why they were using my room and not hers. My replacement roommate was one of my male friends. And I still swear that living with a guy is always 100 times easier than living with another female.

My Very Worst Roommate was a replacement for the friend we had moving out as we renewed our lease. We had all hung out before and she seemed like a very caring and friendly person. But it wasn’t long before she began a laundry list of disasters that made up the longest four months of my life. It began when I told her not to bring all the furniture from her mother’s house. We already had furniture and she was told to scope out the place to see what she could take and fit. But she decided to bring all her mom’s spare furniture and we had a living room with five couches. Ugly couches.

Then she started reorganizing the house. She had ugly decorative plates that looked like they were from Southern Living circa 1985. After settling in, she began her nausiating habit of getting people to feel sorry for her. She would complain of all these hidden diseases she had and all the medicine she had to take. She would always demean herself, saying how she was ugly or unworthy of having friends. She supposedly had a heart condition and had to have a good diet, but was always the first to volunteer Taco Bell and McDonald’s runs.

She faked a Southern belle accent constantly, would tell the same stories over and over and apparently claimed we were best friends of many years when I just met her maybe 10 months prior. She also took over my husband’s TV and went through his files on his computer. She got a boyfriend who would stay over for weeks at a time. After he would leave, she would go on about the things they did, then call her friends and tell them. Her “health issues” got her laid off at work and then I found out through her friends that she was moving out two months before the lease was up. When I confronted her about it, she claimed I was never at home and she couldn’t tell me over the phone. Even though I’d be picking up the entire tab for rent, I was glad to see her shit gone.

My freshman year of college I roomed with one of God’s special people. We met at the session of orientation held for the academic elite and soon proclaimed ourselves BFFs. The first week of school, she brought a guy back to the room while I was sleeping and had sex with him, five feet away from me. When I mentioned the next morning that the noise had woken me up and to just ask me to leave next time, she denied it and said I must have dreamed it.

Over the next month she faked a series of seizures, stopped going to class, stopped showering and brought her pet tarantula back to the room. The tarantula, of course, escaped from it’s cage. I still didn’t realize I was rooming with a sociopath until one day, while looking through her things for a shirt she had borrowed, I found a pair of my panties in her drawer. Her official nickname, at this point, was “the third floor whore.”

The climax arrived right before Christmas, while she was recovering from an abortion by staying with one of the probable baby daddy’s. I was dating a guy in the same dorm and came back to his room one night a little drunk. Despite the fact that she had asked me for a ride to the clinic that very morning, she snuck into the bathroom adjoining the room where I was having sex and made an audio recording. I found out the next morning when walked into the communal drawing room to the sounds of my moans laid down to a techno beat. She moved her stuff out of our room that day.