Best Frenemies

“Wait! You requested ME as your roommate?” Marie didn’t look as happy as I thought she would when I shared this news with her in the break room at Publix, where we both worked. In fact, she looked quite pissed off.

“Yes! And I put it as a priority over my dorm preference!” I was so happy about the thought of living with one of my besties. Sure, all of the OLD people in my life had told me that living with a friend was never a good idea, but what did they know?  Marie and I had so much fun together. We both wanted to live together.  Of course, we did!

At least I thought we did. “I can’t believe you did that without even talking to me!” She was not happy at all.  “Now, we’ll probably get stuck in a shitty dorm!” Marie wasn’t wrong. She closed her locker and walked towards the stockroom, her white Reebok high-tops squeaking on the freshly mopped floor.

I thought we HAD talked about it.  Marie had seemed so excited that we were going to FSU together.  Maybe I just assumed we had talked about it.  I realized I’d made a big mistake.  “Sorry! I will mail in another form!” I yelled after her. This was 1988.  You couldn’t just hop online and edit your housing request form.  It was a whole snail mail process involving a form I no longer had.

Marie wasn’t having any of this.  She yelled over her shoulder, as she kept walking, “no.  It’s fine. It’s too late. I just wish you had talked to me first.” And so we went off to FSU with matching comforters and identical bomber jackets, just like besties.

I knew it wasn’t fine.  I just didn’t know how shitty it would actually be.

It wasn’t shitty immediately.  The first week or so was kind of fun.  Classes hadn’t started yet, and Marie and I roamed the campus, climbing the hills of Tallahassee in the August heat.  We went everywhere together, even the bathroom after getting sick from overeating at the cafeteria.  We even sat in side-by-side stalls one evening after dinner, realizing the “Chinese” food at the FSU cafeteria had been a bad idea.  We had stopped at the post office on the way home and passed our mail back and forth under the stall, so we would have some way to pass the time while our stomachs revolted.  iPhones had not been invented yet.

We weren’t there long before I realized that I was different, somehow.  Marie and our other friends from high school joined sororities.  I had no interest in this.  Not only did I not want to ask my parents for the money, but spending gobs of time with a gaggle of other young women sounded like hell.

Living in a dorm with a bunch of other young women was already hell. Back in 1989, our dorm did not have air conditioning.  (Yes! In Florida.) It also did not have private bathrooms.  There was a communal bathroom on each floor with stall showers, stall toilets, a row of sinks, and a bathtub right next to the sinks without any curtain around it.  One brave/really weird girl took a bath there one day.  I washed my hands superfuckingquick and got out of there.

While Marie was doing sorority things and going out drinking, I read.  Literally.  I sat in bed, propped up by a pillow against the dorm fridge that separated our beds, or on a couch in the lounge, which had A/C, and read books.  I read my school books, novels, and anything else.  I had a Discman and headphones, a graduation gift from Grant, and I wore them to keep others from talking to me.  Sometimes, I hung out with the other quiet, odd people in our dorm.  I first watched In Living Color and The Simpsons in my friend Kirsten’s room.  She was the only person I knew who had a TV and cable in her room.  Marie and I each had our separate friends and lives.  It wasn’t what I expected, but it was ok.

One winter evening, I came home from class to find Marie in our neighbor’s room drinking what can only be described as a suicide. It was a FULL glass of random different liquors. Marie would drink some, and then come stumbling into our room to grab a slice of bread and rub it across the top of our shared tub of Country Crock.  I tried to tell her drinking a combo of alcohol was not a good idea.  She told me I was no fun and weird, and “kind of a bitch.”  I think I said my first passive-aggressive “okeydokey” that day.

Surprise! Marie came home a couple of hours later with puke in her long dark hair and on her bomber jacket.  The high school acquaintance who brought her home was also drunk and attempted to get the puke off her hands by spraying hairspray on them.  I would love to say I took care of Marie that night.  I didn’t.  Our neighbor, Jennifer, who would later be my godmother (more on that later) was the child of an alcoholic and cleaned Marie up and stayed with her.  I was out of there to spend the night in a friend’s room. 

When I walked into our room the next morning, the puke was cleaned-up and Marie had just showered. I said nothing. She was in tears. Marie explained through sobs that she had her period and had been wearing a tampon the night before.  She did not remember removing it and thought it had swum up into her uterus or something.  We were 18. 

So, I did what any decent roommate and sorta friend would do. I walked with her to the clinic.  She explained the situation and they took her back to an exam room.  Marie had her first pelvic exam that day.  The tampon was a no-show and we both learned a little something about cervixes that day. 

I’d love to say we were close again after this experience.  We weren’t.  A couple of weeks later, when I went to put on my bomber jacket, I swear it had a stain on the shoulder.  I accused her of switching jackets, and she denied it. We really didn’t talk much after that. We tolerated each other until the end of the spring term of 1990. Then, I went back home to South Florida and attended FIU, lived at home, and dated a young man who treated me like a princess.  Marie and I wouldn’t spend any real time together for a couple of years.

With my dorm pals, on my way to be baptized 1990