It tasted bitter and grainy, like chemicals

I spent a little time reading the roommate stories on this site hoping to find one as insanely horrifying and disconcerting as mine, but couldn’t. So I have decided that mine tops them all.

My roommate, let’s call her Anne, is definitely her own brand of twisted. And I could never have imagined what has happened to me in the past week could happen. Forget what you’ve read about smelly shoes, neat freaks, drunken binges, and unwashed dishes. We’re talking attempted homicide here.

From the moment I met Anne, I sensed she was a little “off”. I won’t disclose the exact physiological details so as not to indirectly identify her. I’ll begin my story then. . . .

Anne and I started out as friends. She wasn’t the kind of person I was used to being friends with. She was very quiet, timid, a bit jumpy. She’s the kind of person with whom you always wonder “what on earth is going on in that girl’s head?” But I didn’t concentrate on any of this. I was content to allow her, her differences and to remain her friend in spite of them.

We hung out on a semi-regular basis: went to movies, shopped together, stuff girls do. One afternoon we went to see Tuck Everlasting in the theater and afterward, we were walking around the mall. I recall trying to have a conversation with her, but she wouldn’t respond to anything I said. I asked if there was anything wrong. She said that she just didn’t feel like talking. So I let it go. We spoke very little on the way back home and consequently for days afterward. I didn’t ask why. I assumed she needed some space.

After about a week without any resolution, I finally tried to bridge the gap. I was doing homework in my room, she was in the hallway. I hollered at her and asked her what she was up to. She came into my room and said, “Oh, nothing”. I said, “Have a seat.” We talked about little things for a little while and then I asked her if there was anything she would like to talk to me about. She said no. I told her that the reason I had been a little distant lately was because I had been giving her some space. I told her that I had hoped she would come and say that she didn’t want to be distant anymore, that she wanted to be friends again. She looked a little surprised, but didn’t really respond. The conversation ended there awkwardly. Little did I know, things would never be the same again.

The “friendship” pretty much ended there. I stopped including her in my plans and she never complained. I figured things were just fine.

Until two weeks ago. I came home from school to find my other roommate (let’s call her Mara) on the couch watching TV. She mentioned that Anne had made some chocolate pudding and that there was some for me in the fridge. I opened the refrigerator door and found a coffee cup filled halfway with pudding on one of the shelves. I took it out, got a spoon, took a bite and almost threw up. It tasted bitter and grainy, like chemicals. I asked Marie to taste it and she had to wash her mouth out a few times it tasted so terrible. I found this a little weird but I tried not to jump to conclusions. I put the pudding back in the fridge. The next day I asked my chemistry teacher about it. She said to freeze the pudding so that it wouldn’t spoil and to bring it in to the lab that Friday. When I got home, I put the pudding into a clear plastic Tupperware container and put it in the freezer.

That was the first weird thing. The second weird thing was when I went to take a drink of a half full bottle of water on my desk and found that it smelled like Witch Hazel. Needless to say, I didn’t drink it. By this point I was starting to get suspicious.

Then last Wednesday, I was in the shower, about to condition my hair (I have dry hair so I have three different kinds of conditioner because they all do different things). I opened one bottle and poured it into my hand. A lot of liquid came out, it was runny and curdled. So I tried another. Same thing. So I tried the third. It was the same. Once I turned off the shower and let some of the steam out of the room by opening the door, I smelled the bottles and they all smelled like bleach.

At that point, I knocked on her bedroom door. It was morning time and I’d woken her up. I asked her to come into the bathroom. I poured a little of the contents of each bottle into the bathtub with her standing there and asked her, “Can you tell me why my conditioner would look like that and smell like bleach?” She said nothing, only stared into the bathtub. She wouldn’t look at me. After a long silence I said, “If there’s anything going on, I suggest you tell me now because my next step is to go to campus police.” She waited a long time before looking at me and saying “Nothing’s going on.” And then she walked away and went back into her bedroom.

I went to the lab here on campus where I take some classes and picked up some pH paper strips. Anne happened to have a bottle of conditioner of the same brand as one of mine that she’d diluted with bleach. When I took a pH sample, normal conditioner had a pH of 4 (pretty acidic), while mine had a pH of 9 (definitely basic). A difference of 5 pH levels. Regular household bleach has a pH of 12 (very basic). That conditioner would have taken my hair off, maybe even my scalp.

I never did get the pudding tested because I came home from class one day and found that it had been taken out of the freezer and disposed of, the container washed and dried in the dish rack. Just after the conditioner incident I went to the campus police. They questioned her and she confessed to everything. Saying that she had put aspirin in the pudding but really, who knows what she might have put in it. It turns out, she had done things that this before. She came with her adoptive parents the day before yesterday to get all of her stuff. She was not allowed to enter the apartment without a police escort. Both her and her family treated me as if I was the one who tried to poison her. Some people!

Now, what did I tell you? Didn’t I tell you this story would top it all? Man, I sure hope that girl gets some help. I can’t believe this is the kind of college story I have to tell my kids, nieces, nephews, and grandkids.