Rat House

You can smell the ocean from my college house. The stench of seaweed would be stronger some days more than others.

The mold creeps in the corners of the ceilings. We had a front yard, which was exciting. We also had grass. We shared our front yard with our neighbors and on it there was a grill that was not ours and a die table we had yet to paint. It was supposed to be a project for another time. The only time I ever saw that table be used was by our neighbors who went to the community college that was a twenty minute drive away. They were wearing jeans and shirtless, drinking beer and playing a game of die while listening to house music. I was so fucking jealous. I matched with one of them on hinge as a joke. He had brown curly hair and an attempt at a mustache growing in. His profile said that he was from the Monterey Bay, so I asked him if he had any friends from Salinas, which was my way of discerning whether or not he liked Mexicans. He thought my question was really funny, so I did not feel too bad about making fun of him. One day I was struggling to open a jar of pasta sauce and I walked over next door to see if my neighbors could open it. He was sitting on the couch so I gave the jar to him. I waited to see if he recognized me. He did not.

All of our furniture was secondhand. My coworker said she knew the girls who owned our couch previously. Apparently, one of my former coworkers had sex on this couch with a guy who was popular in the local band scene. This brought me joy and I shared the intel with anyone who I thought would care. In a weird and maybe even freaky way, it made me feel like I was a part of something. The college culture surrounding casual sex and beer was also mine to partake in, even if only through gossip.

Our house was a two bedroom, one bath. In this house lived four girls and two dogs. One of the dogs was a corgi. The corgi was my roommate’s. We shared a room and a first name. She is blonde and I am brunette. Sometimes people would call us blonde and dark and I did not like the sound of that. I preferred to be called “worm.” Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would take the corgi from Blonde’s twin bed, where he slept, and place him on my twin bed. I realize now that this is an inappropriate thing to do.

On winter break of 2024 going into 2025 I received news about my college home. I was in San Francisco celebrating with my sister and her friends. When I received the news, I was on a bench with my sister overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Even though it was late December in San Francisco, the sky was blue for us as we enjoyed our sightseeing. I read the text from my roommate and I was told that my house was infested with rats. My roommate stayed at our college town over break so she was able to give us the rundown of what was going on. In our house groupchat, she told us that she contacted our landlord and they gave her the contact information for an exterminator. I considered the problem to be as handled as it could be and went about my vacation. I planned out my vision board for the new year and naively blocked out the problem. My roommate did as well. She had friends from her hometown over. She updated us that we were also having issues with our plumbing, but this was not something we were unused to. I thought everything was relatively fine.

I got a ride back with two girls who lived in my city so I told my roommate that I would arrive two days earlier than I originally said I would. This was inconvenient, as she had just invited a boy from her hometown over. We shared a room, so I asked my friends if I could sleep over at their place and they said yes. The man stayed over for two nights, so I spent that time with my friends, excited to get to know them better. After two days, my roommate told me that she had just gone to work and her friend had gone back home. My time with my friends was up and it was time I went back home myself.

I returned with one of the girls who had been lending me her couch to my home that had now smelled like a petstore. The house felt barren in a way that still felt messy. The living room appeared dull as if it were abandoned. My friend and I were hesitant to walk in. The corgi greeted us, and as pleased as we were to see him, we did not match his enthusiasm. Skeptical, realizing that the infestation was worse than I had allowed myself to process, we slowly walked into the living room, taking our time to examine our surroundings. My heart sank with each footstep, and with that my eyes found what I did not want to admit to see. Tiny brown pellets of doom sprinkled the floors and the tables. Shit.

My friend and I were hysterical. She was braver than I and went to inspect the other bedroom, as my other roommates were not in town yet. Immediately upon entering she screamed and ran out. I don’t remember if she was crying, laughing or gagging, but it was the type of visceral reaction one gets from seeing a dead rat in the center of a bedroom. I checked the bathroom and everything looked normal in there except that the toilet was missing. The toilet was fucking missing. Upon entering my room, the room that had been inhabited by a human for the past two weeks, I found rat pellets on my comforter and in the bins for my clothes. I was sobbing. I felt the words that I had been hiding for so long in my throat finally escape. “She’s not even a good friend,” I cried. I confessed. I erupted. I told my friend about the time she kissed the boy I had a crush on. I told her about the second time she did that. I told her about how all she does is sleep on the couch in her jeans with the lights on and how I wake up in the middle of the night to turn them off. I told her about how she had Israel and Palestine confused for each other well into December of 2023 and how bizarre that was for a sociology major. I was petty. I coped by searching for validation in shallow concepts, like appearing smarter or more hygienic than her. I submitted an application for campus housing and just kinda left them. Over the course of the next year I “worked on myself.” I studied abroad. I solo traveled. I did months of therapy. I went to concerts and bars all by myself and I read Patti Smith and Toni Morrison. I learned rather painfully that no amount of depth I acquired would attract the love in friendships that I was craving because relationships are about something else entirely. You are allowed to be messy. You are allowed to make mistakes. The rules for friendship are not as rigid as I interpreted. You just have to show people you care.