Fred, According to Girl

Fred according to Girl: The people we live with are sometimes so annoying. I cannot deal with roommates. I was not accustomed to sharing my space, my stuff, my place, and neither was Mike.

Kari was my roommate in college. By the time the first semester ended, we hated each other. Yes, she moved out, taking the empty room next to me. It was tiny, the girl had left to get married. I think she was pregnant.

So, I ended up with a double-sized room all to myself. That was perfectly fine with me. I could sleep in until classes called to me. I could hide a gallon of cider in my closet, waiting for the stuff to get hard. Unfortunately, the one time I tried this the cider never really got hard. Instead, I forgot all about it until it turned green, moldy and very nasty. When I finally rediscovered it (when looking for a missing boot in the middle of December), I plugged my nose and flushed it.

Without a roommate I could decorate my walls with a little Batman in one corner, and a cute little apple tree in the other. Was I turning this into my own personal bat cave? Didn’t matter, it was okay if I lost my "damage" deposit. I could blast my music, not make my bed, and throw my clothes on the floor (or on the ironing board).

I could have a stash of chocolate, and it would remain untouched by some slimy roomy. It actually felt great to be free of parents, and have my own place. The best thing about my room was my ironing board. It was always ready to go, so the other girls in the dorm would just knock on my door, borrow my iron, slide the mound of clothing onto the unmade bed and press their "whatevers." I never considered this sort of intrusion annoying, but I did not like roommates.

Wait, would I live with me? Perhaps not.

I wasn’t the worst of all roomies, however. When Mike and I shared war stories of people we had to live with in the past, I do not really think I gave him much insight into the fine art of sharing space from Evie’s eyes.

He talked about some great roommates in college at Central Bible College. But, underneath this sweet kid from South Haven had some wild stuff going on. The stories he shared were about all night poker games, passing around nude pictures of a friend’s girlfriends, tying people up, hanging them from the third floor window upside down, throwing bagged buddies into the library, directly at the feet of the bespectacled, gray haired, eighty year old librarian.

So, when Fred came along, how bad could he be? The only thing I remember about him was that he was always in the way. Our (Mike’s and my) time together in New York did not include Fred. Mike did not want to share space with Fred and Evie, so we found other places to stay. He used his student ID and we crashed in hotel rooms uptown.

I was glad Mike and I never became "roommates." The ironing boards and the library could not handle the strains.

Yes, we both grew up a bit. I don’t paint on the walls anymore and he does not play poker all night with the boys. Ok, suddenly I am having a Peter Pan moment. Did we really have to grow up?