I Starred in a Real Life Lifetime Movie!

Sophomore year at UW-Parkside began with all the excitement and revelry that the previous year had lacked.  I  moved out of the cramped dorm room I had shared with a girl who was nice, but too straight-laced for my desired, under 21 college experience, and into a university apartment with 3 friends who were fun, debaucherous, and a devoted maker of very bad choices, respectively.  There would be 3 wild cards placed in our 7-person residence.  But how bad could they be? 

Well, they ran the gamut, as humans do.  One roommate was one of the most wonderful people I'd ever met and we became good friends.  One was as flat and unmemorable as a diner pancake.  And one was the most disturbed individual I've ever had the misfortune of crossing paths with.  College living went from drinking beer and watching the Daily Show to some heinous Lifetime Movie where the villainess seemed so over-the top evil you had a hard time suspending disbelief.  And it all began so innocently.

One night I awoke around 2 a.m. with an urgent need to pee.  One of my roommates was in the shower, which wasn't so odd as we were taking full advantage of our independence through binge drinking and adopting ludicrous sleep/wake schedules.  Without a second's thought I shuffled over to the bathroom on the other side of the apartment.  It was meant for the 3 roommates who resided on that side, but we weren't dictatorial about it.  If a bathroom was in use a roommate was welcome to pee in the one that was open.  Or at least that was the understanding that six of the seven roommates had.  When I finished peeing and washing my hands, Unstable One, poked her head out of her bedroom and hissed, "Why are you using our bathroom?!"  I explained the situation and with a suspicious look in her eye she ducked back into the dark of her room.  I shrugged it off and went back to bed. 

The following day the phone on our side of the apartment rang, and it was a call for Unstable One.  We had 2 landlines, one on each side of the apartment, so we had to share and be respectful of our phone time.  Unstable One had taken to using the internet in her room which used a dial-up connection and rendered their phone line unusable while she was online.  So she gave out our phone number to her one friend (who also happened to be her cousin) and we would deliver our cordless phone to her so that she could talk and browse the web at the same time.  Unstable One seemed heedless of common courtesy or of taking advantage of people's kindness, so it had surprised me when she seemed so ruffled by my quick potty break in a bathroom she shared with 2 other people.  In any case, I was the one who delivered the cordless phone to her that day, which is when I noticed the sign taped to her bathroom door.  She had used her computer to make a big stop sign image and typed below: "Unless your name is (here she listed her name and the names of the 2 other girls on that side of the apartment) you may not use this bathroom."  My jaw quite literally dropped. 

I talked to my friends and roommates about it.  They found it to be insane and somewhat hilarious and pretty hypocritical, considering her blatantly rude daily usage of our phone.  I talked to the other two girls who lived on that side of the apartment.  They told me they had nothing to do with the sign and didn't care at all if I ever used their bathroom.  While I suppose I should have talked the issue out with Unstable One, I decided to go a different route-- one that was somewhat immature, but extremely hilarious, in my opinion.  I didn't go so far as to design a fancy sign on the computer; I settled for torn notebook paper and a marker with my big, blocky handwriting that read:
"HALT! Unless your name is (I listed each roommate but Unstable One) You May Not Use This Microwave!!!" 

The microwave was my contribution to our communal living.  Unstable One used it liberally and I had no problem with it, until she made her strange bathroom sign.  Actually I had no problem with her using it after posting the sign; I just wanted to call attention to her ridiculous decree via an equally ridiculous decree.  I thought the sign would make a point and bring some levity to a ridiculous situation.  Instead, it set off a series of events so terrifying and deranged I still struggle to believe a human reacted this way. 

One night Unstable One had the apartment to herself.  I was working the late shift at the campus library and everyone else was out as well.  When I returned home Unstable One and her cousin were the only ones there.  They were in our bathroom, although there was clearly no one using theirs.  They were giggling hysterically.  When I asked what they were doing they giggled something unintelligible and left the apartment. 

Over the next several hours and days my roommates and I learned they had been tampering with as much of our stuff as they could get into.  And not in a "harmless prank" sort of way.  It was in a "very real potential to maim you, make you violently ill, or kill you" sort of way.  We all ended up throwing out combined hundreds of dollars worth of toiletries and food.  The only things we kept were canned goods, I believe, and even those felt suspect.  Of all the things I learned that Unstable One did, I'm sure there are countless more I'll never know about.  And maybe that's for the best.  But here is a list of things she and her cousin did that fateful night:

*Put dirty kitty litter in my cereal box (I ate a couple bites before I detected something was wrong)
*Put bleach in a roommate's contact lens case (she flushed her eye out and managed to keep her vision)
*Put Nair in a roommate's conditioner (she smelled it before using it, luckily)
*Emptied my brand new asthma inhaler (there were no puncture marks, so she literally pumped it 60 plus times to make sure I wouldn't have it available during an attack)
*Used all of our toothbrushes to scrub the toilet (we tossed them before using them, thankfully)

We filed police reports and had countless meetings to get her removed from our residence.  It was "our word against hers".  As if this were some very colorful conspiracy to alienate an innocent.  As if we were the bullies, the psychopaths.  She filed appeal after appeal and managed to stay in our apartment until the end of the year.  Meanwhile we kept all of our belongings locked in our individual rooms, taking them out long enough to use them and then immediately putting them back under lock and key.  All of us were equal parts terrified of this lunatic under our roof and furious with the university for not taking reasonable steps to remove her.

There were two times when I guess I "took the high road", times when I could have struck back and hurt Unstable One.  Once was when she had left for class, but forgot her keys on the kitchen table.  There were at least a dozen keys on that chain--the apartment, car keys etc.  At the very least it would have been a pain in the ass to replace them all.  My friend urged me to let her throw them in the dumpster.  I was tempted, but refused.  When Unstable One knocked sheepishly on the door 15 minutes later, I let her in.  Her eyes widened in surprise when she saw her keys sitting where she had left them.  Clearly that wouldn't have been her move had she been in my place.  She actually said, "Thank-you" to me for not fucking with her property. 

The other time was something my roommates and I joked and fantasized about all of the time.  After my facetious microwave sign was posted, Unstable One wasted no time in procuring her own microwave.  It was the largest microwave I've ever seen, almost a refrigerator.  It was sleek, spaceship-y silver and had dozens of buttons for any possible entrée you might wish to heat.  We dubbed it "The Millennium Microwave".  One of my friends and roommates wanted more than anything to snip the power cord with a pair of scissors on the very last day of school.  While that felt like some mild sort of justice, I couldn't let her go through with it. 

In both of these situations, I wasn't being noble; I was practicing self and group preservation.  I had no idea what Unstable One was capable of.  If posting a silly note poked her hornet's nest to this degree I didn't want to see what something malicious would provoke her to do.  I honestly believed she was capable of murder.  So she stayed to the bitter end, with her keys and gargantuan microwave in tact.

That summer I became extremely ill.  I had to take the following semester off to recover.  It took approximately a zillion tests, including a lymph node biopsy to rule out Lymphoma, to determine that I had Epstein Barr, CMV, and latent Tuberculosis.  My friend, who visited me at UW-Parkside every weekend, also got sick, even sicker than I.  She developed lesions on her brain and nearly died.  She was in ICU for months and had to relearn her motor skills.  Unstable one was supposedly a Microbiology major, although not much that came out of her mouth was truthful.  Still, I have no idea what she had access to and what she put in our food and toiletries.  I have no idea what my friends and I were exposed to.  Was she responsible for my illness or for my friend's?  I have no way of knowing for sure.  All I know is that we need better ways to help the severely mentally ill and the people they victimize.  And while it would be easy to say Unstable one was purely evil, it's more likely that she was damaged by horrors I can't even guess at--be they brain chemistry, home life atrocities, or more likely a combination of the two.  I hope someone helped her conquer, or at least tame, her demons somehow, and that they aren't still being unleashed on innocent people as we speak.