When one of my housemates had to move interstate, my remaining housemate had a close friend, Bill, who was keen to take his place. I had my reservations, as his tight-arse reputation preceded him. But he seemed preferable to an unknown.

Upon moving in, a number of minor incidents began unfolding, including:

- A complete adversity to cleaning, leading to a stink cloud encompassing his bedroom so thick you could do backstroke through it.

- Rotating between a total of two meals when it was his turn to cook.

- Mysterious white stains found on the couch following a night out (no, he did not have company).

- Leaving a 1kg block of cheese in direct 35°C sunlight for an entire day, which was returned to the fridge for consumption.

- After said block of cheese ended up in his bed overnight to teach him a lesson, the same block found its way back in the fridge the following morning, seemingly ready for consumption once more.

Enough to make you shake your head and laugh, but things you tend to expect having shared with various housemates in the past. This all escalated however when the other housemate moved out, and we found a new fun and attractive girl to move in.

I often found myself waking in the middle of the night to her yelling at him to get out of her room, after he’d crawled into her bed while she was asleep. As creepy and unfair as this was for her, this paled in comparison to the day the household was abruptly disbanded. One Sunday, Bill returned home at about 6 a.m. following a drug fueled bender at a music festival.

That Monday night, we returned home from work to find Bill on the couch having spent the day at home by himself, behaving as though nothing other than his almighty hangover was amiss. Until our new housemate went to her room to find belongings knocked about, picture frames smashed with shattered glass over the floor, her underwear draw strewn across the room and her covers pulled back with a load of white sticky mess sprayed across her mattress. One messed up individual.

My Very Worst Roommate, was a guy I will call P. I moved to Singapore and needed someone to help pay expenses on a good apartment. I was in the middle of a difficult divorce and one of the only conditions I made to P when he moved in was, “No hookers or drugs, this house is my sanctuary, it’s where my son comes and I need the house to be safe.” I should note that prostitution is not illegal in Singapore. P had moved to Singapore on the pretext of working for a big cable channel. It turned out that he didn’t have any work at all. He wasn’t missing rent, but he was looking awfully worried and I was concerned about missing rent if he didn’t find work. I made a call and got him a job on oil rigs making good money.  He started the job and I headed to China the following week.

I was in China when I got a call from our condo manager at 3 a.m. The manager was furious. “Mr Smith, why are you throwing things out of your 11th story window? You will hit someone! You will get in trouble.” I told him I was in China, and he should call the police because there was nothing I could do. Five minutes later I get a call from my maid. She said, “Sir, P wants me to come and let him into the apartment, what should I do?” Not having any idea of what was going on, I told her I suppose she should but, I could not figure out how P could be locked out – the door needed the key to be turned from the outside to lock it. I texted P and said, “Mate, I don’t know what you’re doing but throwing shit out the window is illegal in Singapore” and decided to ignore the problem.

I get back a week later from China to face a shit storm of trouble. The stuff that had been thrown out was obviously destroyed, but had also damaged the lower ground unit patio roofs – to the tune of $40,000!

Not only that, but there was a lot of stuff missing from the flat including all the chess pieces from my set, a beautiful brass compass and presents from the under the Christmas tree. P would not own up to what had happened and it was only with the help of the security guards and police that I worked out what might have happened.

He had brought a hooker home, probably to celebrate his first paycheck – we saw her coming in on the CCTV tapes. She wasn’t a she though – even I could tell that on the tapes. I assume some sort of dispute over payment or the hooker’s gender had broken out. She had forced P out of the apartment, locked the door and proceeded to trash the place. To give him due credit, he cleaned up a lot of the mess, but tell tale signs were there. He paid for the damages and managed to get off the criminal charges (the cops confirmed he blamed a girl for the damage, but could not provide her name.) When he was locked out and called the maid, she later confirmed to me that when she helped him get back in, he had gone in and there was yelling but he had refused to let her in.

P still works in the oil and gas industry – he’s called the “Chess Master” by all who know this story.

My very worst roommate was once my best friend, but things quickly changed when we moved into a group house and I discovered some rather disgusting habits. I met N freshman year and we became fast friends. We lived next door to each other in the dorms sophomore year.  Although we went to a celebrated party school, she began doing some hardcore drugs that I wasn’t into.  But we remained good friends and we signed on for a group house with a couple other close friends for our junior year. The day I moved in over the summer before fall quarter began, I noticed that she was very upset. She admitted that she had stolen some money from her last roommate, who I knew very well and was friends with. At first I thought no big deal, $20 or something, she’ll get over it.  Turns out that N had taken her former roommate’s credit card and taken over $2,000 from an ATM over the course of one quarter.  The police questioned her and she ratted out some dealers on campus in order to not receive any jail time. So now she had an irate former roommate and local drug dealers on her bad side.

She had a job that summer at a local clothing boutique. She would often come home and give me “presents” like shirts or little knick-knacks.  I was naive enough to think she was just getting a discount or they had extra merchandise. Turns out she had been stealing from them for months and eventually got fired. I would only find out about this months later when I also found out that she got arrested at a grocery store for stealing cigarettes.  So even though she was a rampant thief and was lying to me, I thought she was just going through a rough patch and would get back on track.  Even after she got kicked out of school for blatantly plagiarizing a paper for a psychology class, I figured that she would either re-enroll or wait a year and go somewhere else. I still had faith in her and wanted to be her friend.

She paid rent, but almost never had money for bills (which were minimal as there were five of us sharing a three bedroom house).  Yet she always had plenty of weed, coke and ecstasy — the latter of the two were becoming an increasing habit and starting to scare me. She convinced me that she had it all under control. I was no angel myself and we often threw parties in the house.  We were all underage at the time so I didn’t feel I had the right to judge what she wanted to do to her body. Although the lack of paying bills was starting to get to all of us.

She was having sex with lots of random guys at this time, most of whom she met online and would have one night stands with, and never hear from again. She shared a bedroom with one of my roommates, J. They had a large living space, which they promised to use if they ever had overnight guests. On more than one occasion N would be in bed with some random guy having sex and J would flat out yell at them to get out. Sometimes she would, other times she would wait till J fell back asleep then continue entertaining her guests. One day she came home after being gone for two days with no contact with any of us on the arm of a much older man.  We were all 19 or 20, this guy had to be in his early 40′s. She claimed he was a friend of her dad’s from the Navy. At this time I was still giving her the benefit of the doubt so I believed her. But the last straw for both J and I was when we discovered this “friend of her dad’s” was actually some creepy dude she met online who would drive from two hours away where he lived, pick her up and take her to a motel, then leave her hundreds of dollars at a time. She quite literally had become a crack whore.

So the stealing, lying, not paying bills, drug binges and prostitution just became too much. We confronted her mother about these issues when she called asking where N was because she hadn’t heard from her in weeks. She then confronted us and accused us of telling our mutual friends about the whole stealing incident from her former roommate. We told her right then and there that she had a week to get out, get help and clean up her life. It was really hard to lose such a close friend, but having no self-esteem and an addictive personality turned her into a monster. She asked me to still be her friend and I said I would if she promised to get her life together. This was about 10 years ago. I just read in our hometown news that she was arrested as an accessory to armed robbery.

Where to even begin.

My junior and part of my senior year of college, I lived in off campus, with two other girls in a two bedroom apartment. M had one room to herself and K and I shared the other. K’s Boyfriend stayed over on a regular basis. I should probably mention that K was not exactly fat, but she was bigger, had huge breasts and was rather intimating. The Boyfriend was just plain fat, lazy and sloppy. Not that I had a problem with their appearance, but visualization adds to the story.

The two loved to have sex. All the time. Very, very loudly and not discretely. That was fine with me, I understood we were in college and living in close quarters. However, I had to draw the line when they began to have sex each and every night while I was trying to (but not yet) asleep. One night, I had to wake up pretty early for class the next day. I was trying to fall asleep to the cacophony of their intercourse, and thought I might be able to just wait it out. But no, the Boyfriend continued to mount K and huffandpuff his way towards an epic climax until I became so fed up/revolted/mortified that I sat up in bed and yelled, “CAN YOU PLEASE STOP?” They did, and the next day I asked her face to face that they please not have sex while I was in the room. She agreed and apologized.

Yet, lo and behold, that very night, a repeat occurred. Again, I had to be up very early and could not sleep due to their noise. This time, I didn’t bother to yell anything. I just got up, still in my pajamas and stormed out the door, locking myself out without shoes, keys or a cell phone. I didn’t even bother trying to go back inside. After all, it was better to be barefoot in the cold than listen to K and the Boyfriend have sweaty sex. Instead, I walked to my best friends apartment a few blocks away and crashed on her couch. Many, many nights of sleeping on that couch were the follow.

But the climax of the Great Tale came about one day in early December. I came back to my apartment to shower and change and when I arrived at my bedroom door, it had a note on it that said:  ”DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR OR SHUT THE WINDOWS. THE ROOM IS INFESTED WITH SCABIES AND ONLY THE COLD WILL KILL THEM.” As I stood there pondering it for a second I came to the conclusion that they must be making fun of me. So I opened the door and closed the windows since it was 20 degrees outside. I took a shower and when I came back to my room, the door was closed again, with a new note above the first that read, “WHAT ARE YOU STUPID? KEEP THE DOOR SHUT”.

Again, I opened it, changed and got out of there. I had to find out from a third party, our neighbors, that my bedroom was in fact infested with scabies. The neighbors then proceeded to tell me that K was also going around telling all of our neighbors and friends that I was the one who had brought the scabies into the house, because I was so dirty. She was referring to my pile of laundry I left by my bed on the floor on my side of the room.

I was fairly certain  I wasn’t the one to bring scabies into the house since I was only there about five minutes every few days and didn’t have bug bites all over me like they did. But just in case, I went to the doctor to be absolutely sure. Of course, I was not afflicted and when I asked him if they could have been bred in my dirty laundry he burst out laughing, and told me that the bugs needed a warm and moist place to breed. I mused if the constant sweaty sex in the room could help keep them alive and he told me that type of setting was exactly what scabies thrived on.

There was no way in hell I was leaving my personal items in there with K and her scabies-ridden boyfriend. My mom drove down to my apartment with garbage bags to help me move. She walked into my house to a living room full of the Boyfriend’s friends smoking weed. The Boyfriend turns to her and says, “Hey, Mrs. B, you want to hit this blunt?” Granted, she didn’t really get upset over it, but I found that deeply disrespectful. She helped me gather my clothes and bedding and on her way out, noticed K and the fat sloppy Boyfriend wrapped up together in a blanket my Grandma had knit for me.  My mother held open a garbage bag and said, “Give me that blanket my mother knit for my daughter.” K went to hand my mom the blanket and my mother recoiled and told her, “I don’t want to get scabies. Put it in the bag.” It was the first time I ever saw K intimidated by someone else.

I didn’t go back much until the day I had to move out the last of my belongings. I had found an apartment with a stranger a few blocks away, and could move my few items by hand. I had spoken with the landlord who told me it was fine I move out. I recruited my best friend and another guy to help me carry the bed, desk and dresser. As we were walking up the stairs to my bedroom, I already heard the moaning. Yet the door was slightly ajar. And I wasn’t about to wait for the Boyfriend to finish. I knocked and opened the door simultaneously to a total eclipse of the most horrific scene I’ve ever witnessed. Flab on flab, smacking against each other. They saw us and did not stop. My friends stood beside me, flabbergasted.

I just walked in and started grabbing boxes, the whole time, the Boyfriend yelling, “You’re blowing up my spot, You’re blowing up my spot!” I ignored it and my friends tried their best to. K and the Boyfriend finally stopped and went into the bathroom to shower together, and began to move my bed. Behind it, I saw a used condom stuck to my wall. I hadn’t had sex in that apartment the entire time because I had been there so little. I was horrified. I grabbed several tissues, peeled the dirty condom off the wall and left it on K’s pillow. I thought she’d appreciate the memento.

About six months later, after I had already graduated and moved back in with my parents, I received an email with a long list of charges I owed them. These included six months rent,  and electricity, gas and cable bills for the months after I left. I ignored it because it was too ridiculous to warrant an answer. In the end, K got the landlord on her side. Since I was still technically on the lease until July, and the landlord conveniently forgot our hour long conversation in which he gave me verbal permission to leave, I had to end up paying roughly $900 out of my savings to pay for what ended up being the Boyfriend’s rent.

Fifteen years ago, my boyfriend, T, and I decided to move in together to an apartment in the big city. To save on costs, we asked a mutual friend from the internet, L, to move into the two-bedroom apartment we had selected. We knew her as part of our social circle, but you don’t really get to know someone until you live with them, and we were wrong, wrong, wrong.

L was perennially short of money. All of the bills were in my name, except for cable, which was in hers. A few months into our lease, when the cable wasn’t working and she’d claimed that it was due to technical issues, I called and found out that it had been shut off due to non-payment. She borrowed my car without asking, several times, until I started sleeping with my keys. She ate our food and denied it.

When L lost her job in a grocery store deli, I was waiting tables at a restaurant where you have to wear pins with pithy sayings on them. I begged, and they hired my roommate immediately as a hostess. Around the same time, she started importing guys from the internet to “spend the night” in her room, and when they’d leave; she’d suddenly have enough money for rent. One time, L had a guest and chose not to go into work, or even to call in sick. I tried to make her excuses, but she was fired.

It was Superbowl Sunday, a very busy day, and I had to work a double shift that day. I was bone tired and dirty and hungry when I finally got home, and thinking with longing about sitting in the bathtub with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. I knew it was in the freezer when I left home that morning, so I was sure that it was still there. No, she’d eaten it all and put the empty container back in the freezer.

Things were tense for months, and when she moved out while T and I were at a baseball game, we were mostly relieved. Unfortunately, she took all of my good pots and pans with her. She disappeared from our social circle, but a few years ago, I heard that she took her little habit of meeting men online and getting money for her “services” to a more professional level in her hometown.

After losing my job in this story and moving back to home, I decided to move to the state capital where there were more career and social opportunities. A friend of mine was set to move in with me, but he flaked so I was forced to find a place on my own since I did not know anyone else. Being the problem-solver I am, I took to Craigslist.

I found a place that was really cheap and right next to the state university, so I e-mailed the guy listing it and set up a meeting with him the next day. He seemed nice and I even met the guy I’d be replacing, who was moving to be closer to his girlfriend out of state. A few days later, I signed the application and a form that gave permission for me to replace the guy who was moving out on the lease. A week later, I was all moved in.

My roommate had been out of town when I moved in so I was excited for him to get back so we could bond and I could hopefully make friends. However, he would barely acknowledge me when I spoke to him, sometimes going at least a week without talking. That behavior continued off and on for the entire five months I lived there. After routinely finding little presents streaked on the sides of our shared toilet, I affectionately nicknamed him “Skidmark” to my friends.

While I was visiting my parents one afternoon, he sent me a text telling me that he was filming a video in the basement with some friends and for me to not go down there and to be quiet when I got back. That made us uncomfortable, but I went on back to my place. When I got there, at different points over the next half hour or so, I saw Skidmark and another guy lock themselves in his room, as well as another guy loading up props and what looked like a bed into a truck. Once I was there alone, I went to the basement and found foam padding covering the walls, a sheet blocking the view from the staircase, padding around the light, and a lone chair with bungees and ropes around it in the center of the room. My mind immediately went to porn.

Over the next few weeks, he would bring guys over quite a bit which was fine at first, but he never told me in advance. The week of Halloween I began watching a lot of horror movies and almost every night he brought a guy over. They would shower together. I heard…some sounds through the ceiling. But they always went to the basement. Then on Halloween night I went back down there to use the bathroom and found a pair of dominatrix boots at the foot of the stairs. “OK,” I though, “Maybe they aren’t.” Then I went into the basement bathroom and found two huge dildos on the toilet tank. It was also then that I began to notice how many cameras and external hard drives my roommate had and everything made complete sense.

A few days later I got a text as I was waking up telling me that he was going to film another video and it was going to be crazy stuff he didn’t think I wanted to hear, so I was essentially banished from my own apartment. I went to the leasing office to see how I could get out of my lease but it turns out that Skidmark had never turned in any of my paperwork. There was absolutely no record of me living there at all. I talked to a lawyer and she told me that I was essentially free to go when I wanted to leave. Now it was just a matter of finding somewhere else to go.

Over the next few weeks I found lists of different things he wanted in the videos (#1 on the first list was “Get naked”). It was also around this time that blood splatters began to appear on the bathroom mirror, as well as the in the sink and on the knob. By then, I had completely checked out and luckily found a new place. I told Skidmark I was leaving that weekend and since I was putting him in a bit of a bind, offered to pay part of the rent and bills for the next month. I also told him that I was moving since I was uncomfortable there due to certain behaviors, for which he apologized. I’ve since driven by my old place a few times and saw a new car. I wish the new guy well.

In my second year of university, I lived in a house with a schizophrenic man, a man who looked like Charles Manson, a creepy old man from India who didn’t speak English, and the boyfriend of my extremely jealous best friend. But even though I broke my lease and left early when the schizophrenic threw a desk chair through a second story window, none of these roommates was as bad as MVWR.

In my fourth year of university, I settled into a lovely home belonging to a friend of my parents. My roommates were the landlady’s two nieces, her son, and his wife. We all got along pretty well. There was the odd fight about dishes or leaving food in the fridge too long, but we were all pretty good about cleaning up after ourselves, and eventually I became good friends with the landlady’s nieces, A and L. Unfortunately, L had to move out after six months because she got into a school in a different city. The landlady found a few short term replacements, but had trouble filling the empty room. I guess she was desperate, because one day I came home from school to find a guy sitting in the living room on the couch in nothing but ill-fitting boxers with empty beer cans and an empty pizza box sitting on the floor around him (at 4:30 in the afternoon).

I went outside, closing the door behind me, and called the landlady on my cell phone from my car to ask what was going on. She had always given us advanced notice when new people moved in, and she apologized when I called, saying he was the son of a member of her church and he had needed a place to stay immediately. I told her he was sitting in the living room in his boxers and that it made me uncomfortable, but she said he was just a little awkward and she would ask his dad to call him and tell him not to do that anymore. I hoped for the best, but from my previous roommate experiences, I mentally prepared for the worst.

I went in again and introduced myself, and MVWR was overly friendly, getting up to shake my hand and (shudder) trying to give me a hug. I escaped to my bedroom as fast as I could and stayed there the rest of the night, pretending to be asleep when he knocked on my door repeatedly asking if I wanted to hang out. The following day, I thought I heard him leave, so I went out and sat on a different couch in the living room to watch a bit of TV. He came in, again in nothing but boxers, and sat down as close beside me as possible in a room with two full-sized couches, a chair, and a love seat. I tried to move over on the couch, but he kept inching closer. I told him he was making me uncomfortable, and he laughed and said I needed to relax. Then he reached over and put his hand up my shirt, grabbing my chest. I stood up and pushed him away. I ran to my landlady’s son and daughter-in-law’s room and told them what happened.

They called the landlady immediately, who called the guy’s father who arrived 10 minutes later. His father explained to me that he just had some “social problems” and had previously been charged with assault and had two restraining orders against him, but “he didn’t mean any harm!” and asked if I could let him stay another night so he could find another apartment. I eventually promised not to call the cops since he technically didn’t get a chance to do any real harm, but I refused to sleep there that night and moved out a few months later when I finished school. Oh, and A later told me that, after I left, MVWR’s dad yelled at him so much that it made him cry, so at least there’s that.

MVWR happened in my first apartment out of college. I had lived there for a while with two girls, M and L, who both got engaged shortly after signing the lease. After an unsuccessful replacement for L and with M’s wedding coming up soon, we were getting desperate. This is when R came in to my life. She was from Brazil and had only been in the States a few short months before meeting someone and getting married. Her husband had just recently thrown her out of the house and they were now in the process of filing for divorce as he had, according to her, met another woman. M and I felt sorry for her, and as she was very friendly and engaging, we agreed to let her move in and quickly added her to the lease. The first month or so, things were fun. Although she may have been pretty sloppy (never doing dishes, never cleaning and making a mess everywhere), we became friends.

Being in the middle of a divorce, she moved in with no furniture and no money to buy anything. For the first two months, she slept on a camping mat on the floor of the bedroom she shared with M. When I would stay at a friends, or go out of town, I allowed her to sleep in my bed. Big mistake. Shortly after moving in, she met her first of many boyfriends online. They were quickly talking about getting married, even though her divorce wasn’t finalized. He lived hours away, so she would visit him on a regular basis, as it was easier for her to go to him and not the other way around. On returning from a weekend out of town, I came home to find a messy bed with various pairs of men’s socks not belonging to me in it. She did not understand why I was upset that she and some strange man had a) used my bed and b) didn’t wash the sheets after.

Many other mistakes followed when, I, being a relatively generous person, allowed her to borrow some of my things.  After the umpteenth broken or lost item was disclosed, I tried to put the kibosh on lending her stuff. That never lasted more than a week. After M got married, K moved in to take over her part of the lease. K was a very sweet, albeit naive girl from a very small Midwestern town. She was gorgeous, but completely unaware of it. R, being an extremely jealous and competitive type, seemed to make it her goal to constantly degrade or bitterly demean K by criticizing everything she did from her clothes, to the guys she dated, to her family, etc. R never behaved this way toward me since I was never really considered competition by R since I was “too fat” in my size 10/12 body (she constantly would try to get me to diet using her favorite “miracle” herbal supplements. No thanks).

After more failed boyfriends, she decided she wanted to become a fashion designer and would stay up all hours making poorly constructed clothes. The whir of the sewing machine at 4am was constant, especially if one of her many boyfriends didn’t call or broke up with her.  All of this, although bitchy and annoying, wasn’t that bad. When her second engagment in the five months she lived with me was canceled (both before the divorce was finalized) she started furiously meeting guys online and getting hotels when they came in from out of town. She felt this was unfair and expensive, so we agreed to let her every once in a while have a guy to stay over on the couch. She soon met a new guy M, online. He was relatively good looking and she would talk about him incessantly.  He was coming in from out of town, about and hour and a half away for their first date.  We had originally told her that he could stay overnight.

This all changed when we met him. He was majorly creepy and would leer at you from across the room along with various other qualities that sent both K’s and my creep-o-meter over the top. So we asked R if she could tell him we didn’t want him to stay. She refused, saying she didn’t want to ruin things with him, that we were just both jealous, so I told her I would tell him. I told him that although we had earlier said it was okay, that we were not comfortable with him staying the night. He flew into a rage, asking what the hell did we expect him to do and that we were jealous bitches. He then stormed out. K and I decided to stay up for a few hours more and then about 3 am, he came back and banged on our back door demanding to be let in. We called the cops, but he was gone. R decided that we were liars and continued to see him pretty regularly. I decided, having some connections, that I would run a background check on him.  This showed that he was still married and had served time in jail for sexual assault. That’s right…a convicted rapist. Awesome. I gave R this information, and she again told me I was a lying jealous bitch. Since K and I no longer felt safe living with her, we moved out when our lease expired. Longest eight months of my life.

I moved to San Diego from small town Indiana in 2005 right after graduating high school to live with my boyfriend (who is now my husband). He and I had it rough at first, but finally scored jobs and enough money to stop living in our car and get a room somewhere. We found M on Craigslist and were pleasantly surprised when we went to see his house and it was gorgeous! The rent was reasonable and M seemed like an OK guy. We signed a lease and moved in.

We didn’t know there would be other roommates also until move in day. They were two Amazonian women straight off the boat from Poland. M said they had showed up move in ready and he couldn’t turn them away because they had no place to go. Whatever, we just wanted a place to live! S and C were crazy, crazy ladies.

One night they decided to have a loud party in the backyard with eight Marines. The next morning all eight Marines walked out of their bedroom nonchalantly like nothing had gone on. They smoked and drank and constantly got tickets for being drunk in public. One night, they had got drunk and walked on the beach and tracked sand through the entire house. They made potato and pickle soup at least twice a week and then told us, “You Americans don’t know how to cook!”

The final straw was that they started to refuse to buy toilet paper. I got tired of furnishing it for them and told my boyfriend to keep the TP in our room and take it in and out of the bathroom with us. Guess what? THEY NEVER BOUGHT TOILET PAPER! What the hell were they doing in there?I don’t even want to think about it. Finally, things got too tense and M kicked them out. Things with M were great and totally chill for about 2 years, believe it or not!

Then one day, M decides to hook up with his boss, who was 4’11″ and probably 180 pounds with a Farrah Fawcett hairdo. This was a big mistake as she totally moved in one night and took over. She would wreck the house and scream at everything M did as if he were a child. She constantly bossed him around and was a complete tyrant to everyone. She never picked up her feet when she walked and would shuffle around the house. That sound seriously haunted my dreams.

They also thought it was a great idea one day to get a puppy and let it shit all over everything and not clean it up. Things got so ridiculous but we stuck it out. However, after they started having extremely loud butt sex every night, my boyfriend and I quickly escaped to an apartment of our own where we currently reside. NO ROOMMATES EVER AGAIN.

I actually have two MVWRs. The first was from my freshman year in college. I had told this girl, N, that I would live with her after having the same math tutor. I should have known it was going to be bad when my parents were taking us out to lunch, N was on her phone talking about getting enough bail money to get her boyfriend out of jail (I am probably the most naive, sheltered person — at least I was freshman year — ever, but I don’t know how my parents left knowing who I was living with). We got to know each other and even though we were from very different backgrounds we got along fine. Then after Christmas break, her boyfriend got out of jail. That’s when he decided to live with us, even though we were in a one room dorm and it was against the rules. I was too shy and scared of them to say anything, so he moved in. Because he had just gotten out of jail (for stabbing someone in the neck!) he didn’t sleep well and would often scream in his sleep. That was when they even slept; they often had sex with me in the room.

When he had to go back home, she would call me incessantly because she was lonely and whine about why I wasn’t there to mope with. She even gave me a curfew to come back because she didn’t have any other friends. When her boyfriend was there, they would fight constantly, calling each other horrible names and hitting each other and then have really loud sex with me in the room. I would finally get up and leave. I lasted the whole school year and moved to another dorm the next summer. But that’s not the worst of the worst.

I moved to Australia last year with a friend and I knew one person from the summer camp I worked at. When T said she had two extra rooms in her house, we gladly moved in. My friend and I both immediately got jobs and went about starting a life. T started getting jealous about us honing in on her friends, so she started wild rumors about us, never invited us to their events, even though they specifically asked her to invite us. When we did go to parties where she was, she acted horrible to us. We were there during the awful brushfires and T decided she was going to start a clothing drive. She collected clothes from everyone and said she would drive them to the area affected by the fires. After doing this she ran around the house calling herself “Angelina Jolie” and “an amazing person.” But first she went through the clothes to see if she wanted to keep any of them (which she did) and then never donated them. They sat in our kitchen for months. When my other Australian roommate L finally moved them out of the way, she called him at work at shouted at him for touching “her stuff.” She finally donated it to the Salvation Army five months later.

Her room was disgusting, she kept all her dishes in there so we never had any, she threw temper tantrums constantly and then an hour later would try and hug us and say she loved us. We were going back to the States in July, so we told her at the end of may when we were leaving. And even though she knew we were leaving early from the lease, she acted surprised and expected us to pay our rent through the end of lease even though we wouldn’t be there. She refused to find another roommate and so we had to do it. Finally, she always complained she was broke even though she got paid $500 a week and her parents paid her rent, so when the refrigerator broke a week before we were set to leave, she asked us to help pay for a new one. Wow. Our friends in America don’t believe she actually exists.