The Roommate Test

Yesterday, I came home to a surprise standing in my kitchen. No, it wasn’t a man covered in chocolate syrup, but it was a man. He wore a blue-checkered shirt, jeans and a pair of TOMS. He looked shocked to see me, like I walked in on him doing the dirty. Instead he whispered, “Hey.”

Instead of me running away screaming “I’m being robbed”, I stood and stared at him. He was obviously homosexual; I mean what straight guy takes the time to clean dirty dishes. And he was cute. In that creepy, stalkerish “don’t arrest me” type way.

Turns out the guy cleaning the dishes was a friend of the roommate and not there to sell me to some gay black market. She said they went to school together and worked together before she moved away. He was the swim team and track team captain, which answered my question about his thighs. Those things could kill something.

Anyway, we got through introductions and they sat down to have a glass of wine. They haven’t seen each other since graduation and needed desperately to catch up. His exact words. It was on his third glass, that the sassiness/anger started coming out, pun intended.

He complained on everything from the color of the walls to the way the wine tastes. He complained about the classmates, who he has never met, but brought up to speed by the roommate. He complained about his work, life and the way he “slept from bed to bed, from man to man.”

He was going a mile a minute and I couldn’t keep up. I officially lost him on his fifth glass. It was when the bottle started running out that the GBF started running out of steam or things to complain about.

“My life is a series of unexplained nuisances,” he said, the only thing my ears picked up and the only thing we had in common.

It was as he was leaving that I saw the true side of my roommate and how much she misses home. Well not home itself, but the people there. As she shut the door, that look placed upon her face, I wanted to ask her a few questions of my own.

“He was very…”

“You should’ve seen him in high school. When he was single, fat and made fun of.”

“He was?”

“I was the only one there for him. We’ve been inseparable since. We even went to prom together.”

As she moved on to clean the table, I wondered just how much of my roommate did I know? I wondered if this was the roommate test, that if we could see how we reacted with our friends, we would know how to react to each other.

I hope she’s ready, because my friends will be here next Tuesday.