Room With a View (3 Discontinuous Nouns Story)

Microwave, Frame, Button.

People will tell you that university is the best four years of your life. That’s just because the next few years are, without doubt, the worst.
My first year as a graduate was nothing like I had pictured. Silly me, I had somehow deluded myself into thinking life would turn all sunshine and rainbows as soon as I got my hands on that diploma. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
As a psych major with next to no job experience, I wound up a full time ‘administrative assistant’ at a small accounting firm, fancy way of saying I filed things all day. Well, that’s not entirely true. Sometimes I had to label and alphabetize them first.
Most of my friends went back home to live with their parents, but I managed to scrounge enough together to rent a small apartment in town, nothing glamourous. I was on the third floor, sandwiched between a struggling single-parent family and an old woman who did her best to live up to the title of ‘crazy cat lady’.
The apartment itself was small, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen-living room. I slept on a mattress thrown in one corner, cooked all my meals in the microwave, and did my laundry down the block. I didn’t live there, I merely survived.
I was there for almost a year, all told, before I finally left for good. Dress it up however you like: I found a better place; I needed somewhere closer to work, truth is that in the end, Maggie won.
Maggie was my roommate, the roommate from hell, no joke. She kept anti-social hours, had no concept of personal boundaries, and took everything I did very personally. I couldn’t even reason with her, she did whatever she wanted when she wanted, rest of us be damned.
Wasn’t much I could do back to get my own back either. My usual passive-aggressive notes went unnoticed, Nair-filled shampoo bottles would only collect dust. I couldn’t even threaten to get her kicked out.
Maggie was a ghost, lucky me, and she had no intension of going anywhere. She been dead ages, died well before we ever met, but from the way she acted you’d think I killed her. Sometimes I kind of wished I had.
Ever tried getting your landlord to shell out for repairs? That’s nothing, try getting him to spring for an exorcism. So not happening. I couldn’t even get a discount on the room, not that it would have mattered much: I must have spent half my rent over again each month just covering her damages.
Maggie, you see, liked to play jokes. Sometimes they were harmless, like turning all my clothes inside out, or flipping all my photos in the frames, so they faced inwards. Annoying, for sure, but that was at the beginning of her reign.
Soon she graduated to writing on the walls in lipstick, or slamming the doors in my face. She played havoc with my alarm clock, and turned food rotten before I even got it out of the bags. Every time I thought I’d seen it all she came out with something new. One of the last stunts she pulled was ripping the buttons off my entire wardrobe. I found them later, hidden in my cereal. The dentist was most sympathetic.
The last straw was when she ‘redecorated’ while I was at work. I came home to a very upset landlord and a completely trashed apartment. Gathered up as much as I could salvage and called in a few favours. I didn’t even stop to say goodbye. I can take a hint.
Even if Maggie got the last laugh in the end, I can’t say I hold much of a grudge. After all, she did give me the best ever bad roommate story.