Member-only story
I Had to Flee in Secret from My First Roommate
Residence Life said that if we weren’t roommates, it would be a stalking situation
At age 18, when I received the contact info for my randomly-assigned roommate, I thought I’d hit the jackpot. Let’s call her (not her real name) Kersti. I was a water sign, she was a water sign. I loved Shakira, she loved Shakira. I’d be studying Portuguese, she wanted to study Portuguese. We’d chat online for hours, excited for the day we’d finally meet. I couldn’t believe the university matched me with someone so fun to talk to and so similar in terms of interests.
Little did I know that just two weeks after move-in, I’d be sitting in my parents’ van, riding away from my university — so shell-shocked from Kersti’s intrusiveness and hair-trigger hostility that I kept glancing back, irrationally afraid she might be hiding somewhere behind the seats, utterly unable to let me go.
That was my welcome to college.
During move-in, my parents noticed the problems I couldn’t see. There was the moment Kersti’s mother confided to mine that she’d effectively been kicked out of a live-away study program before for behavioral issues, vaguely adding that it was great I was so laid-back — as if anyone who couldn’t go superbly with the flow would have a hard time…
