Rat-Faced Roommate

This story is about a roommate that I had in college; and one of the main reasons that I now insist on living alone.

For the sake of privacy, I'll call her Lina. Since she was a random roommate, the odds of her being cool were statistically against me, but,I decided to keep an open mind. Until she walked in and I realized she was the fucking personification of a rat. As in, her top lip didn't even cover her front teeth, so when her mouth was in a relaxed position, all you saw were two big chompers.

To say that our relationship was strained is an understatement. One night in the beginning of the year she let a known coke dealer named Frankie into our apartment unsupervised, and I woke up in the morning missing my laptop, camera, and perfume. The fact that I was in such a drunken comatose that I didn't wake up while he was doing this is worrying; though irrelevant to the matter at hand.


Lina was passionate about cooking, and would cook for anybody who could stand to sit across from her for an hour and stare at her ugly rat mouth chomping on pasta. Italian food was her specialty, and she could bread chicken cutlets faster than a Cambodian child stitching Nikes in a sweatshop. It was a systematic process which often seemed to overload her pea-sized brain. Because Lina and I were at odds for the majority of the year, I was never invited to these get-togethers. I wouldn't have cared at all except for the fact that my bedroom was directly off of the kitchen, so as she was making calls to get anybody (read: anybody) to come over for dinner, my emaciated form would be laying on the bed writhing with hunger as the smell of marinara sauce wafted under my door. Too bad for Lina, I would come home drunk every night and eat the leftovers anyway, so fuck her.

During second semester, Lina developed a crush on a guy named Mike who lived in our apartment complex. He was the epitome of a male-chauvinist asshole, and she loved it. He would literally barge in the house and order her to cook from him. She would be sitting on the couch nibbling on a block of Swiss cheese, or doing some other rat-like activity, and he'd go "Lina you fucking slut where is my chicken parm?" This was their typical night:

• Lina cooks while Mike screams profanities behind her and grabs her ass. She wards him off with a spatula.
• They eat while she chatters on and he feigns attention.
• They go into Lina's room where all I can hear are yelps from the rat and strange grunting noises.
• He grabs his shit and leaves.
• She cries and eats leftovers.
  

So one night, Lina and Mike, who at this point had been "seeing each other"- to the extent noted above, got in a big fight. She felt terrible about it, and so the next day called him promising him dinner; and the best part; he didn't have to come over to eat. It would be hand delivered a la Lina. I don't know where the fuck she found a bowl big enough to hold all the spaghetti she made, but it was about twice the size of an upside down lampshade. On top of the pasta were about 10 chicken breasts. She covered the carbohydrate monstrosity in tinfoil, and walked it over to Mike's apt to give to him and his roommates in an attempt at reconciliation.

Skip to the next morning.

I'm laying in my bed at 10am when I hear a blood curdling scream that could only have come from the rat herself. Then I hear gasping sobs marked by inaudible curse words. Since she had already woken me up, the least I could do was humor myself and go out to see what was going on.

So there is Lina, standing outside the front door, barefoot, standing IN THE ENTIRE UPTURNED BOWL OF SPAGHETTI. It was priceless. Apparently, Mike, at some point during the night had decided that this would be hilarious (I don't entirely disagree). She had innocently stepped outside in the morning and into the mass of pasta, the situation exacerbated by the hours of time she had spent on this dinner. I actually felt bad. Not bad enough to help her scrape 5 lbs of spaghetti off the ground, obviously, but bad enough that I got her a trash bag and stood on in awe and embarrassment for this poor girl.

To date, it is the most humiliating act I have ever seen against another person. I will never forget it.