I was sitting in the front seat of the car as it slowly pulled up in front of my new living quarters for the next eight months. A wash of emotion flooded me. I was excited, clearly, to branch out on my own apart from my overbearing and, oftentimes, overly (and falsely) sugary sweet mother and my helpless father. At the same time, I could end up living in smaller quarters with someone insane. Sure this "Holly Stewart" seemed nice enough on paper. We had written e-mails back and forth to make sure we weren't duplicating supplies for our room. All I really knew about her, however, was that she would buy the futon and the fridge if I bought the loft bed unit and that she was pre-med, which I suppose means she is some sort of science nerd. I think to myself that I bet she wears glasses and squints at things and I snort aloud.

"What is it, sweetheart?" my mother says as she plasters a smile on her face.

"Nothing" I retort, as we pull up in front of the dorm.

Chaos doesn't even begin to describe the scene. It seems like there are, at least, one hundred people milling about on the lawn in front of the dormitory. I don't really feel like dealing with anyone, but know I must interact with the upperclassman with the clipboards to get anywhere. Begrudgingly I unbuckle my seat belt and hop out of the car. I find one of the overly-filled-with-school-spirit clipboard holders and wait in a short line to talk to him.

"Name?" he inquires.

"Gail Peck"

"Floors here work in this order, all-male floor, all-female floor, all-male floor, all-female floor. The all-male floors are floors one and three and all-female floors are two and four. You will be housed on an all-female floor."

"Thank you, captain obvious. This university is giving you a degree soon? That's scary. I'm not sure a degree will help you."

He glares at me but continues. "You're on floor two, room 220. When you walk in through the doors behind me you'll walk a little ways down the hallway. On the left there is the front desk. It is where you will pick up any mail you might receive and, today; it is where you will pick up your room key. If you lose the key there is a $50 replacement fee." He checked my name off his little clipboard list and yelled "Next!"

I grabbed a few of my bags out of the back of the car and told my mother to wait there while I went in to obtain the key. I was thankful that my mother wanted to get rid of me so early because the line to get the key was slimmer than I am sure it would have been in the later hours. The girl at the front desk gives me the key and directions to my room. I follow the hallway back towards the entrance and make a left through another door immediately in front of the entrance doors. I climb the two flights of stairs and open the door to floor two. My room is about three-fourths of the way down the hallway. To my disbelief, the room isn't empty. I hadn't expected my roommate to arrive earlier than me. Yet here she was.

"Hi, you must be Gail!" she says in a tone of voice much too cheery for eight in the morning.

"Yeah, right. Hi." I drop my bags down on the side of the room she hasn't already claimed and trudge back out the door to go gather more of my belongings, which after seeing how full her half of the room was already becoming, I was glad to have only a small amount of things.

I barged out the entrance doors and swiftly walked by Señor Clipboard and he flashed me a sour smile.

"I can park here for fifteen minutes, I was told, without being in the car. So lets get these things out of here and go meet that roommate of yours, shall we?"

Must everything this woman says be dripping with rancid sugar? I don't voice my concerns on these issues and silently grab as much as I can carry so she can get out of here as soon as possible. She follows me silently (thankfully) to the door of my room, which I notice is now propped open. She breezes past me into the room and exclaims,

"Oh the loft just looks marvelous. Doesn't it look marvelous, Gail?"

"Yeah, lovely" I deadpan back. As usual, she isn't fazed.

"And you must be Holly?" she inquires.

"Yes, hello, it is nice to meet you Mrs. Peck" Holly said as she thrusts her arm forward towards my mother confidently.

"Don't be silly, dear, Elaine" my mother says as she shakes Holly's hand.

I try to busy myself by arranging some of my bags in convenient locations for unpacking so I do not have to witness this awful exchange. Unfortunately, busying myself doesn't make me deaf.

"What are you here at school for, dear?"

"I am pre-med." Holly says as she arranges some things on her desk.

"Oh, that's very ambitious. I always say being a doctor is almost as good as being a police officer" my mother beams and I roll my eyes. "My Gail is studying criminology so she can go into the family business, police work" at this I am pretty sure my eyes have rolled back into my head. I bet Holly and all her fancy medical knowledge could tell me whether or not this is even possible.

"Oh, well that's cool" Holly replies.

You're pretty sure she has re-arranged her desk three times in the last five minutes. Maybe she is OCD. Great, just what you need, an OCD roommate.

"Yes, cool" my mother stresses the word as if it is offensive to her. "To protect and serve"

I want to bash my head against the wooden support beam of the loft. I need to get out of here.

"Right, mother, let us go get the rest of my belongings. Fifteen minutes, remember. Chop, chop!"

"Well it was nice to meet you, dear,"my mother says to Holly and turns to exit the room. I can see Holly visibly let out a sigh as my mother exits the room before me.

We grabbed the rest of my belongings out of the car. Thankfully, my mother had already wasted too much of her day driving me out here so she simply dropped the bags off in my room, said "Make me proud" in her condescending tone, and exited the room. I had never been so happy to see someone leave a room. Holly turned from her desk towards me and smiled,

"She's quite a lot to handle, isn't she?"

"You don't even know the half of it," I mumble back.

Holly spent the rest of the day unpacking her belongings. It only took me two hours so I climbed up into my lofted bed and relaxed while listening to music through my headphones.

We lived together for a week and everything seemed to be going smoothly. Or so I, foolishly assumed. Holly came into the room one evening and all hell broke loose.

"First of all, you're a slob" she said to me when she noticed the TV dinner carton lying on top of the microwave.

"Would it really kill you to throw this away?" she says irritably as she throws the container in the trash with enough force to break the floor.

"It might, and I am too young to die" you retort back, giving her a wolfish smile.

"How can someone who has so little belongings make such a ridiculous fucking mess, Gail? You realize we have a tiny shower stall so when you leave your products in there, there is even less room for me to shower. Hence, why we agreed on the caddy. Your desk looks like a goddamn bomb went off and I am pretty sure there is not a single surface on your side of the room that isn't covered in cheese puff orange dust. Even some of my stuff is covered in it. If you're going to snoop through somebody's belongings, officer, you might want to be a little stealthier. We have to live together. I am so sorry that this pathetically small dorm room isn't the overly large house you're accustomed to…"

"First, WHY are you saying all these words? Secondly, excuse me?"

"That's right, I Googled you."

"Oh, well, look who should be the detective now" I say with venom lacing my voice.

"Do you even know how to be nice? Is there a messy cold storage shed where your heart should be? You know what, don't answer that. I know the answer"

"I thought you were supposed to be Pre-Med? Shouldn't you understand that I wouldn't be alive if that were the case? I thought you were smart. And, aw, was your comment supposed to hurt my wee little feelings?"

"I doubt I could find your feelings with the Hubble telescope. No wonder you don't have friends."

"What's that? I couldn't hear you over all the nerd you were spewing." I'm quite proud of myself at this response and it seems to take Holly aback for a moment. The features on her face shift a bit and then return to the clear mask they were prior to my comment. She climbs up my ladder and sits on the end of my bed and begins eating a bag of pretzels sloppily.

"Hey, get the hell out of my bed!"

"Am I invading your space with my mess?" she smiles sweetly at me.

"Fine, Holly, I get your fucking point. I'll keep my cheese puff fingers on my side of the room."

Her face falls as she realizes that I've totally missed the point, again. Which, of course, makes me smile triumphantly.

"Oh, shit…" she says as she drops a pretzel on my bed and smashes it. "How could I be so clumsy?"

This girl with her shit-eating grin was on my last nerve. She took every venom-laced phrase and tossed one right back at me. Her wit seemed to match my own. It was absolutely infuriating. She was absolutely infuriating.

"Fine. Fine. I will use my shower caddy and I'll try to keep my half of the room more orderly. However, in exchange, I will start not giving a shit when you want to go to bed at 22:00. I'll be loud as hell because why should I care? I'm not the one who wants to get up at five o'clock in the morning to go out on a jog."

I beam a smile at her again, but it's fake and she knows it. She narrows her eyes at me and replies,

"I guess I'll just have to be incredibly loud when I get ready for my morning jog, then."

"Go ahead, I could sleep through a hurricane."

She clearly realizes what I've already realized—that we are at a standstill, dead even. Nobody is going to win this battle today. She continues to sit on my bed, probably thinking it annoys me, but for some reason it doesn't. She's infuriating and I might hate her…but….

She sure is hot as hell.