After a Monthlong Delay...

I am proud to present my series on roommates as promised before my life momentarily imploded. Reconstruction has begun, and I am now ready to write these stories, which I hope will be entertaining if nothing else. The series will be six parts and will only include the most entertaining roommate stories. These stories are really about my crazy roommates--not the roommates I enjoyed my time with. I will be changing the names just because that's what writers do when they write about real people. :) I hope ya'll enjoy the series, and I hope they are worth the wait. Just as a teaser, the six parts will be as follows:
1) The Dorms, Part I
2) The Dorms, Part II
3) My Ex-Best Friend's Little Sister and My Brother's Girlfriend
4) The Time In Between
5) The Extremist
6) The Faux-Vegan and the Gamer (Or 4 Evil K-er's in One House?!!!)

The Dorms Part I

In the fall of 2000, I did something quite out of the ordinary and moved into the dorms for my first senior year of college. It had originally been my mom's suggestion, but somehow I became really excited about it. I moved into Canada Hall in August of 2000. My roommate was to be a Japanese student, which I had hoped would be an interesting experience. When I arrived on the day we were able to move in, my suite was already completely occupied. The living room was already set up, the kitchen shelves were all full, the bathroom counter had things piled all around and on my first day I was already feeling shut out. It turns out that I was moving into a suite with 4 Japanese students and a student athlete who had already been there for the whole summer together.
After about a week, I had a small space on the very top shelf and a drawer in the kitchen, a part of a shelf in the bathroom and of course my half of a bedroom. I also had three Japanese suitemates who were extremely shy but talked to me a bit, a Japanese roommate who wasn't shy, but who didn't talk to me and a student athlete suitemate who spent almost no time in the suite. I don't even remember my roommate's name, but I do know that she was a biology major. She was planning on going to med school because it was what her parents wanted, and she was dating a black man because it was what her parents didn't want. This much I got from the shy suitemates during our limited conversations. I'm also not sure whether she actually ever finished college because she was quite the party animal.
Unfortunately, there was nothing terribly noteworthy about these suitemates, and I was not making any friends. So when a space opened up in my friend's suite across the hall for the next semester, I jumped at the chance to make the move. I would not be roommates with my friend-- neither of us wanted to jeopardize our friendship in that way-- but I would at least have a friendly face in my suite. Plus I'd met a couple of her suitemates and they also seemed nice enough. It was looking like the spring semester was going to be MUCH better.
Fall semester drug on and on, and finally it was December and my new suitemates had told me that I could start moving my things in before it was time to go home for Christmas break. We set a date and I prepped myself for the move across the hall. Come moving day, they had cleared two full shelves for my food in the kitchen, plus one smaller shelf for my dishes and a drawer for my silverware and other similar things. My room was supposed to be ready for me to move in. My future roommate had been told that she needed to gather her things and get them all on her side of the room so that I could move in but when I opened up my room, I discovered that she had made no attempt to prepare for my arrival. Her clothes were strewn all over my side of the room and there was a blanket covering some boxes on the bed that would soon be mine. My friend came in and helped me toss her clothes over to her side of the room. She stepped out after that was done, and I proceed to remove the things from the bed. I picked up the blanket and before I could toss it across the room, I realized what was in the boxes on the bed. It was her umm... let's just say her personal pleasure toys. I was startled and disgusted all at once. I didn't know what to do. So I covered up the boxes with the blanket, wrapped it all the way around and tossed the whole package across the room and onto her bed. And then I considered burning the mattress, but I figured I would probably be charged for it, so I just settled for flipping it over.
I wish I could tell you that was my only encounter with her personal pleasure toys, but unfortunately it was not. We would meet again soon, during the spring semester, in a much less subtle way. I know that this first encounter was not at all subtle, and yet, it gets worse.
When we all returned for the spring semester, I almost never saw my new roommate. The suitemates said she spent a lot of time at her boyfriend's house in Carson. What they didn't tell me, was what she did with her boyfriend when she stayed at home in the dorms. So about four weeks into the semester, I came home late one night after hanging out with my best friend and my roommate was already asleep. I left the lights off and went to my computer and was instant messaging with my best friend (yes, I know I had just left him, but we were bored college students awake at 2am with nothing better to do) while I was working on an assignment for the next day. I heard my roommate's phone ring and I heard her answer. I expected it to be quite brief since she had been sleeping, but then I heard her start moaning. I continued my instant message conversation, thinking that maybe she'd just been yawning because she was tired. But then I heard a buzzing noise and the moaning proceeded to get louder and louder, until it became screaming. I called my best friend on the phone thinking that maybe she just didn't realize I was awake and that if she heard me talking, she would be embarrassed and stop. But instead, I wound up giving my best friend a sneak peek of what was happening in my suite, because she just proceeded to get louder and the buzzing persisted. I decided to go back to my best friend's room for a little while and left the room just as she was saying, "And now I am touching..."
The next day, she started up a conversation with me, as though nothing abnormal had occurred. I played nice, all the while just wanting to hurl as I tried to block out the buzzing sound.
Fortunately, that was the last time I saw her. Apparently she moved to Carson to be with her boyfriend, ditching her student housing contract and leaving me with a room to myself. I didn't find out about this until two weeks later when I came home after a weekend at my parents' house to find all of her things cleared out of the room. And by all of her things I mean everything that buzzed or hummed was gone, but she did leave me an unopened bottle of Kahlua, so I guess the experience wasn't all bad.