Room Raiders3: revolving doors

My senior year had the least to report. We did go through two other roommates that only stayed a semester, but those partings were for other reasons-other than crazy. But my super-senior year was a dozy. I decided to rent my first off campus apartment-a 5 bedroom with only 3 other  people I didn’t know. The landlord was going to give us a deal to only pay as if it were a quad. Well one guy I knew through a friend, and then he knew the other 2. I met the others all once. A guy and a girl.  Shortly after meeting the two girls I was informed by a friend of mine that she thought the girl might be into some illegal substances. Not wanting to be a part of any of that I confronted the roommate I new best. He vouched for the girl and said he was sure she wasn’t into anything. So I let it go at that.

Then everyone else moved in over the summer except for me. And when I went to visit there was an extra girl staying there. Apparently a 2nd girl had signed on unbeknownst to me. The total rent went up but our individual bills went down. About a month after the move in I got a call from my friend saying he feared he was wrong and that they were using in our apt. He confronted them and what followed was a mess and eventually they were kicked out.

By then of course we were committed to a lease of 5 bedrooms with only 3 occupants (The nice landlord said by adding the 5th person we had raised the rent so he would not cut it back down to 4 people even though he knew we were kicking them out due to drugs).

So we put an ad on the campus site and found one guy fairly quickly. Then we found the women’s head volleyball coach. She was in her 30’s and wanted a place closer to campus where she could stay after late practices. It felt strange to me having a real adult in the apartment, but for the first month of the semester I never saw her. Then sometime during the second month or so she told us she had won the custody battle she was having with her ex and now had to stay at home with her kids and could no longer live by the campus. We told her she needed to find a replacement. She suggested the assistant volleyball coach, a man named Stew who was also in his 30s. Stew came and saw the apartment, said he’d sign on, set up a meeting for the following day to sign the lease, and then disappeared. After a week of searching we found out he was in the hospital with a ruptured colon. I don’t even want to know how that happens. But that was the end of Stew moving in. And also the end of Amanda the head coach who though she hadn’t found the agreed upon replacement had also been fired from the coaching job and didn’t have the money for the apartment. And of course we were still paying the 5 person rate.

The rest of the fall semester with the 3 boys was less eventful. We had separate bathrooms-they insisted, not me. Which was great because we didn’t argue about who had to clean it-mine was cleaned regularly (by yours truly) and theirs was not… Though one of them did shave in my sink one day and failed to rinse the hairs down the drain. Seriously dude? Hide the evidence. When I vomited in their toilet once when I was sick I cleaned it after! But I guess that wouldn’t hide the evidence since the toilet was then cleaner than when I found it. Would it have killed them to load or unload the dishwasher? We never found out. I was used to borrowing clothes from my female roommates and with these guys that just wasn’t an option. Asking them to do my makeup before a night out wasn’t an option either. But also none of them stole my clothes and pretended they were their own, and they just didn’t do the dishes period instead of getting into fights about who should do it.

In the spring one of my friends from freshman year (ironically one of the girls I tried to room with in that original lottery sophomore year) moved in and she stayed the whole semester. She out girled me in a minute. Put pretty frilly things in the bathroom and lent me clothes and makeup-just what I needed. We had some great nights finishing off chocolate cakes, left over fondu and an endless box of chocolate covered pretzels.

So there it is: the big 18, 19 if you count Stew and his colon. And I hope you agree that living with me couldn’t have caused someone to become a klepto, shit on the floor, rupture their colon,  do drugs (that was even before I moved in), or win a custody battle and be fired from the university. I mean maybe I could have screened people better, but some of that was the university’s lottery process, and who can predict a ruptured colon (actually, can you?)