Excerpt from The Roommates

True Tales of Friendship, Rivalry, Romance, and

Disturbingly Close Quarters
By Stephanie Wu
THE CREATIVE BULLIES

IVE HAD ABOUT THIRTY ROOMMATESincluding three classically trained opera
singersbut none of them were as horrible as my high school experience. In my junior and
senior years, I went to a residential arts school to study creative writing. My roommate was a girl
Id met during a summer program, also for creative writing, at the same school. It was fine at
first, but it didnt take too long for things to go really, really bad.
My school was a very isolated environment, with two hundred kids living under one roof. There
were only about fifteen people in the creative writing department, and you saw everyone for
hours every day. I cant remember when it all started falling apart, but suddenly, I was the target
of a group of eight girlsand my roommate was one of the ringleaders. Art school kids arent
just mean, theyre creatively mean. Theyre almost better at assessing your character and the
things that will bother you than kids at a typical high school. I think they chose to bully me
because I was easy to pick onall my clothes matched, like a big pink blazer with matching
pearl earrings. It was clear that I was bothered by their bullying and didnt stick up for myself.
That made it more fun for them to torture me. They were mean to others as well, but I think my
suffering was unique because of the close proximity.
The worst part was, I had to see these girls every day. It was especially hard during workshop
time, because we writers were always sharing personal stories, and I knew theyd be able to use
my stories against me. And my roommate was a compulsive liarwe took a poetry class and she
told me that she made up things that had never happened to her. She once wrote a poem about
how, when she was cast as a princess in elementary school, someone said, How could there be a
black princess? Everyone else thought it was such a moving poem, but it was all made up.
The girls did things like taking an unflattering photo of me and setting it as the background on
the school computers. When I went home for the weekend to see my parents, my roommate and
her friends stole my food, slept in my bed, and went through my makeup. I found swipes of their
fingers in my lip gloss and eyeshadow. They also started stealing things from me, like one shoe
but not the other. They wore my clothing when they went downtown, and then took photos and
put them on Myspace for me to see while I was home. When I was in the shower, they went on
my computer and combed through my instant messages and sent them around to one another.
By the end of the semester, my mom was really upset. She spoke to the people in charge of
residential life and told them my roommate was stealing and breaking my things. Their best
suggestion was to take photos of my room before I left for the weekend, and they said, If
anything has been disturbed, well handle the situation when you get back. As soon as I went
home, my roommate wrote on her LiveJournal, Its too bad my horrible roommates Bose
speakers went missing. My mom read this and called the school, and of course the speakers
hadnt been touchedthey were messing around with me. I went to my writing teachersin art
school, theyre almost like your parents because you see them so muchand they told me to
tough it out. Girls are mean sometimes, they said.
I remember they took my pads and taped them to the mirrors and wrote next to them, What is
this, a jumbo plane? I had a sign of my name in my room, and they wrote swear words all over
it. They stole at least a hundred dollars worth of my stuff. I even spoke to a therapist a few
times. At this point, all the friends Id come to school with had teamed up with my roommate, so
finally I decided to sleep on the floor of a friends room until they moved me to a different room.
My problems with that group of girls persisted throughout senior year, but at least I had a
different roommate by then. The girl who moved in with me was the first opera singer I lived
with, and she acted like a diva, even though she was only fifteen. She got up at seven every
morning and played one of two CDs, either Rene Fleming or John Mayer. I always woke up to
her singing along. She was also very high maintenanceevery night she painted her fingernails
to match what she was wearing the next day. She had a portable bowl hair dryer that she sat
under, wearing a gold brocade blazer and opera diva clothing. She bought her prom dress at a
secondhand store for girls who cant afford expensive dresses. She lied and told them she
couldnt afford a dress, and then bragged about how cheap it was. Of course she became friends
with the group of mean girls, but she didnt go out of her way to make my life worse.
I dont know if there was one worst thing the girls did to me, but they had a huge effect on my
overall confidence. Despite the fact that I knew what they were doing was mean and wrong, a
part of me always wondered if it was my fault or if I was asking for it in some way. I still have
moments where Im very self-conscious because Im wondering what people will think or say
about me.
Ive had a ton of crazy roommates since thenmy college roommate listed her number one
interest as Everclear, the drink, and named her fish Sushi. She liked to party a lot, and during the
first week of classes started sleeping with a male cheerleader on our floor. One night they were
having such rowdy sex that my friend in the next room over, who shared a wall with her, fell off
his bed.
One summer in college, I did a homestay in France. Thats where I had my second opera singer
roommatethis huge, six-foot-three guy with bright blond hair. I assumed he was gayhe told
me he was an opera major, he loved Kelly Clarkson, and he worked at Sephorawhich partially
explained the makeup I saw on his dresser and the fact that he wore mascara. When we climbed
stairs, he said, These stairs are working my thighs like a Hungarian shot put. Then one day he
came into my room and said, Hey, your friends are cute. Do they have boyfriends? I was
completely speechless.
I later studied abroad in Rome too, and lived with eight other girls in one huge apartment. These
girls were overwhelmingthey partied a lot harder than I ever did. One had a threesome in her
room. One night, two of them came back and there was blood everywhereapparently one of
them had punched a taxi driver. They never cleaned or took out the trash, and left trash bags on
our balcony. I went out there once to find it covered with maggots.
But none of them could ever compare to the mean girls. After all these experiences, I guess my
tolerance is really high.
M, 24 (F)

Copyright 2014 by Stephanie Wu
Stephanie Wu is an editor at Town & Country, covering culture, food, and travel. She is also the
founder and editor in chief of MochiMag.com, an online publication for young Asian American
women. She was raised in Taipei and now lives in New York with a roommate.