u/AuthorAdjacent

Back when I was in college (I’m a woman just so you can imagine me but it’s not relevant to this story), I had a tight knit group of friends. After COVID, we came back for senior year and five of us decided to live together in an on-campus apartment. It was me and my friend “Dana” in a shared bedroom, our friend “Greg” in the room across from us, our friend “Lucy” in a room across the shared living room, and finally our friend “Tom” who lived across from Lucy.

Tom was definitely not as integrated into the group as the rest of us. Me, Dana, Greg, and Lucy were all super tight and we hung out together a lot. But Tom was Greg’s best friend, and he was close friends with my best friend and former roommate “Penny.” I also lived with him briefly before COVID. Back then, me, Greg, Penny, and Tom all lived together in a single room with four beds. Which SUCKED. And with all of us on top of each other, it was hard to live together. At the time, I dismissed every annoyance as proximity.

Tom used to snore like a saw. His side of the room was always a hot mess. And he STANK. His feet had the worst BO you can imagine, and all of his shoes radiated that smell at all times. He was our friend so we never said anything. And again, I chalked it up to be close living quarters. Also since we had to leave school and do virtual learning for a while, our time living together got cut short. And I decided to live with him again (this time with separate rooms). This, my friends, was a mistake. Let’s talk about why this whole situation went downhill, and why it ended up with me and Dana tossing his stuff in a dumpster.

Senior year apartment. It starts okay, but then, Tom starts inconveniencing us. His first offense was that he kept boxes of his personal items in the shared living space against a wall behind the couch. We asked him for months to move it, but he didn’t. And when he did, he put the boxes in front of his door in the hallway connecting his and Lucy’s rooms. This was a fire hazard, and when someone came for inspections, they fined both Tom AND Lucy for the infraction. Even though it wasn’t Lucy’s stuff and we’d asked Tom to move his stuff over and over again. Tom laughed about it and we were all not happy with that at all. The reason he couldn’t fit his junk in his room?? Because it was like an explosion went off in there. Every inch was covered in trash and clothes and rotting food. Luckily, the smell stayed contained, but his hoarding made it so that his stuff was spilling out into our shared space.

He wouldn’t knock. Once, he walked in on Lucy while she was changing and when she got mad at him and screamed at him to get out, he got mad at HER! More than once, he just walked into me and Dana’s room, or barged in on me and Greg when we were watching tv shows like we always did. And he would stand over us, talking crap about what we were watching. He would also interrupt while we were hanging out too, and just lurk over us because he wanted to be included, but he would actually ever want to participate.

Unfortunately, this did lead to us excluding him from activities. I could feel our relationship straining and nobody really wanted his energy around. I admit that we could have been nicer, but it was hard when he was the source of so much discomfort.

He also refused to get a dining plan. It was optional for people in apartments, so whatever. But Greg and I both had one, while Lucy, Tom, and Dana did not. Greg and I, having plans, hardly ate at the apartment. But we’d have breakfast stuff and some snacks at home. Lucy and Dana cooked for themselves. Tom, however, only ever ordered out. And he would constantly complain about how he didn’t have money. We would offer to take him grocery shopping, but he refused. And in between DoorDash, he would help himself to our food. He texted me during a short school break once that he at the limited edition popsicles that I bought for myself and said he’d buy more. He did buy more, but it’s like the principle of the thing. And the only reason he bought more was because he knew I was not about sharing food. But he ate the WHOLE BOX in two days. Then retroactively told me. He made not having money for food or a dining plan everyone else’s problem.

Overall, he was obnoxious, smelly, disrespectful, and all of the worst parts of a roommate. Eventually, as all things do, it came to a boiling point.

There was a crazy incident where Lucy, fed up with his BS, said some terse words about him to Dana and Greg. Tom overheard and, instead of confronting Lucy about it, stormed out of the apartment. I didn’t know what was going on. I got filled in later. Then, Tom started posting ominous crap on his instagram story. Stuff like “I can’t do this anymore,” “I have no one who cares about me,” “I don’t want to be here anymore.” I try to call him to come back to talk it out. And he ghosts me. I have a lot of trauma involving a sibling with severe mental health issues, and this situation put me into a spiral. I had a full panic attack that night. Then, the campus police showed up at our door which made it even worse. Turns out, one of Tom’s other friends called a wellness check on him because of what he was posting.

Eventually, the cops found him in one of the campus buildings studying like nothing happened. And when he came back he gaslit all of us and yelled at us for calling the cops. Even though we didn’t. He said that his posts weren’t ominous at all, and that he was just studying and we were stupid for being worried about him. That day, we all sat down and had a serious talk about his behavior and why it had gotten to that point.

From then on, Tom kept to himself. Nothing much else happened. He was leaving to study abroad in our second semester (yes all of that stuff above happened in one semester), so we breathed a sigh of relief. In fact, only Dana and I would still be around since Lucy and Greg were both graduating early. Dana and I looked optimistically to the future, even though we’d likely have to live with strangers.

But then, during winter break, I got a call. Our pipes burst and made our apartment completely unlivable. We were so shocked. The school had no explanation. But then, they said something that made me think: Maybe someone left their AC on.

For context, we went to school somewhere very cold. We were all told to turn off our ACs by a specific date, or else we risked pipes freezing and bursting. But you know who never turned off his AC and kept it running all through fall and winter?? Tom!!!! So Dana and I basically put two and two together.

Dana and I had to move into a new apartment, just us two. For courtesy, we texted our old roommates to let them know what happened, even though it didn’t impact them. And that’s when Tom told us that he’d left a bunch of his junk in the apartment. He left clothes, shoes, a backpack full of important memories and photos and documents, his CPAP MACHINE, a TV (but not the remote), stacks of books. And more. He told us to donate some stuff (like his CPAP. Which btw, you can’t donate because gross.) Let’s just say, coming back to a ruined apartment where we had to move all of our own things, only to find out that we also had to move our ex-friend’s junk too?? It was the last straw.

Dana and I junked almost everything in a rush of anger. We could have donated stuff, I know, but we had literally an hour to move out and literally couldn’t be bothered to take the extra time. We needed to move our own stuff. We weren’t going to prioritize the crap that someone we didn’t even like anymore carelessly left behind. We threw out shoes, clothes, books (all of the books were outdated text books anyway), his CPAP. The only thing we saved were the mugs, and we shoved them into a box in Dana’s car. If he wanted them back, he could come get them himself. We also took the TV. He said we could so we did.

We did get an email about some of his junk being removed and held at the student center, but we didn’t bother to go pick that up until literally a week before graduation.

When Tom asked what stuff we could salvage for him, we lied and said that the flooding got all of his stuff. It was too bad. But we heroically salvaged his mugs. He believed us. We gave him his box of junk back after graduation and I haven’t spoken to him since. He’s the sole reason why I didn’t have a roommate in graduate school. And he destroyed our friendship with his BS. So, I don’t regret throwing his stuff away. Maybe that makes me a petty b*tch but he honestly deserved more for how much turmoil he put all of us through for that one semester.