t’s a bad sign when the first thing you hear about your new roommate is a warning.
“Oh shit, you the new roomie? Damn, good luck to you. He used to room with his best friend from high school or something… Sam, I think. Yeah, even he couldn’t stand Greg after a while.”
“Oh shit… why is that?”
“I dunno, but that Greg smells like shit all the time so probably that. Anyway, good luck.”
Or maybe I should’ve seen it coming when I serendipitously got allocated university housing midway through the semester. Anyone whose roommate gave up on them a few weeks in is certainly no candidate for roommate of the year. Regardless, living on campus would cut down my daily travel time by 2 hours, so I was more than willing to grit my teeth and bear with it. Afterall, this was only going to be for half a semester. How bad could he be?
Bad. So fucking bad. So, so, so bad.
The moment I stepped into the room for the very first time, I instantly knew I was in for a doozy. Greg was not a clean guy. There were piles of laundry everywhere – draped on the chair, tossed across the bed, overflowing out of the laundry basket, in clumps on the mini-fridge. The room smelled damp and sweaty and stale. The windows and curtains were shut tightly, and despite it being 30 degree celcius outside, the room was freezing cold. All the lights were off, the room illuminated only by his sickly-orange incandescent table lamp.
As I approached his desk, I could see the mess of polaroids tacked onto the corkboard, each featuring two guys – a brunette and a blonde. Greg and Sam.
He grimaced when I approached.
“Hi… I’m Alex, it’s nice to meet you.” I extended a hand in greeting.
He didn’t even get out of his chair. “Okay,” he muttered, brushing a hand through an overgrown pile of dark, greasy hair. “Whatever.”
The next morning, I awoke to find Greg had already left for class, and a note had been left on my desk.
House Rules:
I scoffed at number 8. How did this man not see the irony?
Wait, what? Then I heard it. Scritch, scritch, scritch. Right in the corner of the room, wedged against the wall, half-hidden under crusty pieces of underwear, were two hamster cages. And in case you’re wondering, yes, it’s illegal to house pets in dorm rooms. That’s when I knew this was going to be a long semester.
I avoided Greg as much as possible, only returning to the shithole of a room to sleep, which I couldn’t ever really do anyway, what with the screeching hamster wheel and the suffocating stench of sweat, food, unwashed laundry and hamster shit assaulting my nostrils. For how much he cared about me not touching his things, Greg didn’t seem to give a single fuck about any of the things he owned.
I’m pretty sure he never did the laundry nor washed his sheets. I watched on multiple occasions as he picked out brown-stained underwear from his dirty clothes pile to change into (INTO!!!). He constantly ate in the room too, which wouldn’t really be a problem, except he only seemed to eat vinegary foods, which combined with the lack of ventilation and his leaving dirty dishes overnight, would saturate the room with this nauseating, sour, piss smell. He never seemed to care for the hamsters either, and never changed their bedding, which only added to the piss smell in the room.
Somehow, I bit my tongue through it all. I thought I could handle it, until today.
When I returned to the room in the evening, the smell had somehow gotten worse. The room was pitch dark, and Greg, bathed in yellow lamp light, was squatting in the far corner, cooking something vinegary in a portable cooker on the floor. Damn it. I’d been trying to avoid returning during his cooking time because that’s when the vinegar smell was particularly potent, but it looked like today I was shit out of luck. No matter, I could handle it. I sat down to do some work on my laptop.
Then, Greg opened the fridge. Twice.
Instantly, the smell hit me like a semi-truck. It was unlike anything I’d smelled before. Unlike the unwashed laundry or the hamsters or the vinegar… not even like the cup of tea he’d left out for 4 weeks (yes, FOUR) that bloomed an impressive blanket of furry white mould.
It smelled like if you distilled the inside of a garbage truck into a single cloud of noxious gas that permeated the entire room. I accidentally inhaled a lung-full of putrid rotten eggs, my eyes instantly watering as I choked back the bile rising in my throat. I stumbled out of the room, desperately trying to hold back the vomit, an inexplicable sense of panic gripping at my chest.
After vomiting my guts out in the toilet, I was now more furious than terrified. I had to put a stop to this once and for all. This was ridiculous. Bad hygiene I can deal with, but how can this guy not smell that and want to run away?
When I returned to the room, Greg had finished his dinner. The plate of vinegar whatever lay on the floor, but Greg himself was nowhere to be found. I felt a random surge of audacity. Fuck him, fuck his rules. I stepped into his side of the room for the first time in months. If he’s not going to clean his shit, then I’m going to do it for him. I gripped the handle of the mini-fridge. I could feel my heart thudding in my chest. I held my breath and swung it open.
I stopped cold in my tracks, the icy feeling of horror and realisation crystallizing in my veins. It wasn’t that he was lazy or unhygienic or really liked the cold. The smells, the darkness, the frigid temperature… they were just there to mask his worst habit of all.
Suddenly, I could hear his footsteps approach outside. I slammed the fridge door shut and sprinted back to my side of the room.
I’ve been lying on my bed in the darkness ever since. I’m not sure if Greg already knows I broke his rules and I’m not sure if he knows that I know. Greg’s cooking again now, right in front of the door. I’m too terrified to move and too terrified to call for help. The whole room smells like vinegar. I don’t know what to do. All I can see is the blonde hair and the one blue eyeball.
I don’t want to be the next half-eaten head in Greg’s fridge.