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.