My Creepy Ex-Roommate

After many different roommates with varying degrees of success throughout my college career, I found a good match in Spider. We spent half the summer living together and got on like a house afire. Unfortunately, someone else had reserved the same dorm room as I had for the actual year.

See, the way dorm selection works here is that you can opt to stay in the same room for the next year. Then anyone who wants to stay in the same hall can pick rooms. Then anyone in the same building. Then other returning students. I live in one of the big-ass corner rooms, which were originally three-person rooms. Thanks to the fire codes and/or basic human decency, they're now only putting two people in them. The rooms can only be taken as a double, so other cheap people who want the reduced double rates but also a nice big room are always interested.

The previous spring, some chick had wandered in, shook hands, said "I'm going to be your roommate next year! Big room!" and left. I hadn't thought anything of it at the time.

Until this summer, when I tried to get Spider in as my roommate for the whole year. We basically got laughed at by the folks in the housing office, and informed that the other girl, who'd chosen a room without consideration of a roommate, had first dibs.

I was annoyed but I could understand their logic. I'd have been very unhappy if I had been told that I had a different room because my quondam roommate had gotten some bright idea. Spider had to move across campus to a horrid, tiny freshman dorm where her pot smoking roommate's boyfriend slept over every other night. She was much more annoyed.

I was lonely, knocking around in an otherwise empty dorm building. Then my roommate showed up, boyfriend and relatives in tow. She seemed pretty normal.

She moved her stuff in. She didn't have much stuff. She seemed to not know how to set up her computer, and asked everyone in earshot if they could help her assemble it later. Then she left and I didn't see her again for hours.

I got bored and started plugging her computer together. She came back and thanked me. Then she started unpacking. She asked me "where I do my writing." Being easily confused, I thought she meant where was I published. I proudly plugged this website, but it turned out instead that she's one of those longhand people.

It's a three-person room. There are three desks, three bureaus and three closets. I had my stuff in two of the bureaus and one closet, leaving her one bureau and two closets. I don't have as much hanging clothing as other girls do, so that's how previous roommates and I have always done it. When she first came in, I'd apologized for having my stuff everywhere already and offered to move anything if she asked me.

Two of the desks had our computers on them, and the third had the TV and VCR on it for ease of both of our use. I offered to clear off the spare desk, but reminded her that there was nowhere else to put the TV. I suggested she could move her keyboard to write, or pull out the desk drawer and put a board over it. Or put her CPU on the floor. Or use a drawing board to write on. She seemed to think these over.

So then I quit plugging her computer together and went over to get some twist ties to keep her cords from tangling. She walked over to my refrigerator and bookshelf and started looking at my books and stuff.

HER: Are those real skulls?
ME: Oh, no, I wouldn't be able to afford real skulls. They're plastic. But check this one out! It's a fetal skull. Isn't it cute?
HER: (desperately tries not to touch it) What is it for?
ME: Decor! And it's cute. I got it at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. This guy made castings in plastic and hydrostone, for the garden.
HER: Is this a Ouija board?
ME: Well, it's brand-X.
HER: (concerned) WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
ME: Um, it's off-brand. Generic. It's not an official Ouija board; it's made by a different company.
HER: Ouija boards scare me. Why do you have a Ouija board?
ME: Well, it was cheap and kind of neat-looking and round and made of wood. Also, it's on top of a lazy susan that wasn't big enough, effectively making it larger.
HER: What's a lazy susan?
ME: (picking it up) One of these, like you use in a cupboard so you can get to different spices or cans of stuff.
HER: Ouija boards scare me.
ME: It's just a piece of laminated wood. And it's not even a real Ouija board.
HER: I might have something else at home. Made of wood. You could use that instead.

Later that day, she asked me about how someone could get a single room. She hadn't ever had a room with anyone before, and [glance at skulls] she needed more space. To write. [Glance at skulls again.]

This made me feel a little bad. Spider and I had joked about how I should try to scare her, like in those "50 Ways to Drive Your Roommate Nuts" lists that are always bouncing about in the ether. However, I am a big pansy and absolutely hate confrontations, so it was pretty much a given that I would not be cranking up the Sabbath, hanging nudie posters and pretending to worship Baal.

I scared her off when I wasn't even trying to be scary. Most days I don't even remember those skulls are there. Or the machete.

Whenever I came back into the room, I could tell if she'd been in during my absence. All my skulls would be facing the wall. I moved 'em back, of course, and she didn't ever say anything.

If she had said, "Hey, your skulls are creeping me out. Can you take them down?" I'd have been ready to negotiate. I'm not creepy. Just my skulls. I think. I just didn't want to set a precedent wherein she said absolutely nothing and I attempted to read her mind.

For the first two weeks of school, she didn't sleep in the room once. I stopped leaving the light on when I went to bed. She stayed with her big dumb boyfriend in the men's wing of this floor. I think it was mostly because they were enjoying each other's company - you know, like rabbits - not because of how much she hated me. She came in a couple of times a day to get clothes or use her computer.

Her computer use patterns were kind of bizarre. She didn't have a screen saver set up. She was prone to wandering off in the middle of a task, so it would often display the same Gap webpage for hours and hours, sometimes overnight. Her icons were all labeled as though by a small child. ICQ was titled "TALK TO NATHAN!!!!" and WinAmp was "PLAY MUSIC!!!"

Occasionally she would write three sentences of a paper for a 200-level Ecology class, then leave that sitting all day instead.

As I continued in her absence to play personality detective, I noticed she had a couple of pop spirituality books and a Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul poster. Ick. This marriage was headed for the rocks.

I did try to talk to her a few times, but she wasn't often in when I was. In retrospect, that may have been on purpose. She seemed skittish. She tried to talk to me, too, but it was usually about how she had so much reading to do. Her schedule showed only a few classes, one of which was military science, and she couldn't have had more than three books. There went any possibility of intellectual dialogues.

It probably didn't help that I kept forgetting to shut up about certain things. I play roleplaying games, read horror fiction, adore zombie movies and was at the time the #1 Friend of Evil. I'd be merrily describing how my 2nd level cleric of Yig, Father of Serpents kicked all kinds of zombie ass in response to some innocent question of hers, then I'd realize that she'd gone a little pale.

I'm really just a big dumb goof, but in her mind I was rapidly approaching tower sniper levels of creepiness. I think the turning point came when she walked in on me having an innocent but animated telephone conversation on the Green River Killer (semi-local, never caught) with an acquaintance.

The next day, she finally talked to me about our situation.

HER: (after much hemming and hawing) I need my half of the room.
ME: All right, as I said when you moved in, what would you like me to move?
HER: (stutters and mumbles for minutes) Well, I don't really want to...I want to move...but I want you to move things (becomes less coherent)
ME: Do you want to move out, or do you want me to move things over?
HER: (is incoherent for minutes)
ME: Do you want me to move things, or do you want to move out?

Eventually she got it together again again. Basically, she was talking to the complex director and he said she had to try to work with me before he'd let her move. That being done, formally, she could claim irreconcilable differences and demand a transfer. I wished her well.

Then it took her about two weeks to find another room. This time she'd learnt her lesson and actually talked to prospective roommates before foisting herself upon them. I overheard her talking to her big slab o'boyfriend on the telephone about that. She seemed a bit annoyed that her new roommate wanted to have coffee and talk with her before she moved in.

I refrained from mentioning that this whole unpleasant situation could have been prevented if she had come up to me the previous year and asked, "By the way, you aren't a big freak, are you?"

I'd have owned up. She also could have asked me if I loved the baby Jesus. One of the reasons she gave for moving out was that she was "more spiritual" than I was. Dammit. I really should have claimed to be a Satanist.

Her boyfriend helped her move out. She twitched and fretted, he was as stable and slow-moving as a golem. About as talkative, too. Spider moved in and everything was happy.

I've run into her new roommate a few times since then. Each time, she jokingly asks me if I'll take her back. The expression in her eyes is less and less of a joke. It seems my roommate is off being jumpy, shallow and uncommunicative to someone else now.

When she was trying to get the moving paperwork done, various acquaintances informed me that she was describing me as "scary" and going on to describe my décor, mentioning the skulls in particular. She was explaining to all and sundry that I was creepy and frightening, just because I wasn't all rainbows and unicorns.

Judging by both of our subsequent roommate relationships, I wasn't the creepy one.