Throughout high school, I read all these horror stories about bad roommates and wanted to room with someone I knew in College. I had met this one girl through local school events and she seemed nice. We were the same major and had shared many interests and hobbies. (We will call her Shannon). Before college, Shannon and I went shopping together for dorm stuff. I ended up paying for most of everything, plus I continued to buy stuff for our dorm all summer.

When our families moved us in, her mom asked my mom if she needed to buy Shannon anything like toilet paper, ect. We were a little annoyed with the question because they didn’t bring anything like that for us. Anyways, her mom bought a few things and two microwaveable bowls to heat soups and stuff in, one for each of us. I brought my two favorite coffee mugs (not intending for her to use one, but Over the semester, Shannon would make Beefaroni and leave the dirty bowls for weeks. I used one of the bowls once to make cheese dip for BOTH of us. Other than the dip, those bowls grossed me out. When we moved in, we had to sign a “roommate agreement” form. The most important thing we agreed on was to ask before we used each other’s things. She broke this often.

While we were just chilling around the dorm one night, we were talking about our high school life and old friends. She explained how she was a bitch in high school and everyone was afraid of her. She kept going on about how good she felt every time someone called her a bitch. She actually told me this! That’s when I decided that I would do my best to put aside any roommate issues expecting things to be explosive if I ever confronted her. (which things were still explosive towards the end of the semester)

Shannon is a big moocher. Everything of mine was “both of ours” but everything of hers wasn’t anything I could really use. She didn’t bring much of anything both of us could use. During our first week on campus, she ate an entire bag of my goldfish. Normally this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but she brought a jumbo box of goldfish for “both of us” that she kept locked up in her closet. She did things like this on more than one occasion. She always claimed she didn’t eat deserts. I guess an entire pack of fudge cookies doesn’t count as a desert.. I often found a few of my drinks missing from the fridge. Besides food, she used my qtips. I walked in the room a few times to find piles of them on her desk.

In the beginning, her family gave us some cases of water (as did mine). However, her mom also gave her three empty gallon jugs for water because they were not going to continue supplying us with water bottles. My parents kept giving us bottles, which were mostly consumed by Shannon. Every time she was in the room or leaving, she would grab a bottle. (this will be brought up later)

While we were still settling in, she complained about my brown paper bag full of extra toiletries under the bathroom sink. While I was doing laundry one day, she took the liberty of “putting away” the contents of the bag even though I had nowhere to put them. Everything ended up on the floor where the bag was. She always complained that my room was messy. I did often have stuff piled up in a corner between my bed and closet, but you couldn’t really see it from the rest of the room. Meanwhile, Shannon always had a pile of clothes and hangers in the middle of the room. My boyfriend would always comment on her underwear and everything being in the middle of the room. Her clothes stunk too because she only showered about twice a week.

Shannon was also an avid pot smoker. I had smoked once before college and no intention of smoking in college. I am planning on being a teacher and I knew drugs could ruin me. However, Shannon got me to smoke with her. Before we started dating, I had a crush on my boyfriend; when things started to look promising, I quit smoking. She saw how successful I was at quitting, and attempted to quit a few times. We obviously had some issues we needed to talk about. Almost every time I tried to talk to her she was higher than a kite. Thus, we didn’t have the chance to talk about “us” This is about the time I realized she was not a good influence on me. She got me to smoke, I got her to quit.

Once I started dating my boyfriend, she got angry with me often over nothing and claimed it was because she was “coping with not having a boyfriend”.

Shannon is kind of a whore. I don’t know how many times she complained to me how everyone calls her a slut/whore. Yet, she would still go to parties and sleep with random guys. One time, she brought back a guy to the room, sat on her bed, and they both waited for me to fall asleep. I knew what was going on, so I pretended that I could not sleep and he eventually left. I don’t even remember his name.

Shannon doesn’t get along with anybody. Our friends across the hall can’t stand her (we’ll call them Hannah and Heather). The four of us used to be friends, but things changed when she caused problems in Hannah’s relationship with her boyfriend. Long story short: Shannon kept telling the boyfriend things that weren’t true about Hannah. He eventually broke up with her. When Shannon found out they broke up, she confided in me that Hannah did nothing wrong and it was all her fault. She then went on about how “good it felt to have a victim” and how she wished we could all be friends again. Of course Hannah had no interest in fixing their friendship. Heather was pretty disgusted with the whole situation, but she lost interest in Shannon’s “friendship” when Shannon told her that she needed space and was trying to find new friends. We were all confused at what she meant, but Shannon was even more confused when Heather actually gave her space. Shannon kept complaining that she had no friends and that she didn’t know what she would do without me. I felt a little bad and put my feelings aside for her. My boyfriend and Heather’s boyfriend can’t stand Shannon either. They even complain and joke about her! I find this funny, because guys usually stay clear of “girl drama”.

People outside of our “group” aren’t fond of her either. Not many people talked about her to me because I lived with her, but everyone else only had bad things to say about her. The few friends she had she would treat like crap. Not only would she say horrible things behind their backs, she would say mean things to them in person! (She told me she was hoping they would get the message that they were annoying her).

Shannon wasn’t only rude to friends and fellow students, she was rude to both of our parents. She would call her parents with me in the room and badger them. She put them on speaker so they “couldn’t argue back with her”. Instead they just hung up. One time while my parents were dropping off some stuff for us, Shannon was being rude to all three of us. My mom said “Well it looks like you want us to leave” and left. While they were walking down the hall, they could still hear Shannon complaining to me. My mom said something I’d love to mention: She mentioned that Shannon seemed sweet when she first met her, but it’s like she is two people now that she has gotten to know her.

In the words of my boyfriend: “Shannon is a thief”. One day while we were in our room, She handed us a handful of headphone jacks she has collected from the piano lab and told us we could pick one. Among the pile, Caleb found his jack that had gone missing. (Were music majors, and one of our classrooms is full of pianos. We need jacks to plug in our headphones. Shannon would go to class early and take any jacks that were there).

One day a sweet girl in our hall was missing her keys. She emptied her purse in front of her door looking for them, but left to find an RA that could let her back in her room. There was a $20 bill in the pile, and while Shannon and I were on our way to do laundry, Shannon took the $20 and gleefully laughed about it the rest of the day. Shannon also had a ton of jewelry that she claimed she stole from a store called Claire’s. She let me borrow earrings one time and said “if you don’t give them back to me, I’ll just steal another pair”.

— This is not even half of the “horror stories” but this is already pretty long so I’m going to round this up. —

Back to the water bottles: I asked her not to drink so many bottles because our supply was very low and she wasn’t contributing any bottles at all. She tried to say she didn’t drink many and I just kind of dropped it. (I had already made my point so she at least knew she needed to stop drinking so many). That night, she lay in bed next to me and started posting nasty things about me on twitter. She knew I could see her tweets, and I did. Now I’m not one to get into “internet drama”, but verbal communication wasn’t getting through to her; so I tweeted “I’m sick of people mooching off me and my family”and went to sleep. We talked the next day and we both decided that we couldn’t live together.

I am so happy to be rid of her!