We Really Never Should Have Been Roommates

In the span of 48 hours, my roommates—acquaintances I moved in with when my best friend, their former roommate, moved out—and I have all been sent home from our jobs to our 950-square-foot apartment in Bed-Stuy.

Inherited Roommate No. 1 is a bartender. I appreciate that she is a deep romantic with lots of feelings. Our only fight was not so conveniently last week, when she showed up at my birthday and suggested the possibility of voting for Trump if her candidate didn’t win the primary. I screamed a bit.

Roommate No. 2 is a different story. We’d already been living in a semi-stable state of passive-aggressiveness. Shortly after I screamed at Roommate No. 1, Roommate No. 2 poured my bottle of wine down the sink. She likes to establish lots of rules for the apartment (like, apparently, Chardonnay will become Drano if left out for an hour), but doesn’t see the need to follow them herself.

Roommate No. 2 decides to go live with her boyfriend at his inherited condo in the West Village. She’s made it clear that she has the most important job in the apartment, and Roommate No. 1 and I were already fretting over the possibility of a work-space showdown in the living room. Roommate No. 1 and I celebrate her departure with southern recipes from my mom’s cookbook. We play Yahtzee and drink beers stockpiled from the bodega. On the weekend, we turn to liquor and text all of our exes. We make TikToks, we make martinis, we make fun of Roommate No. 2’s Instagram posts with her boyfriend. We eat a gigantic box of Goldfish. I consider going to my parents’, but Roommate No. 1 insists I’d be fucking her over, so I unpack my suitcases.

Roommate No. 1’s boyfriend starts spending a lot of time at the apartment. He is the kind of Brooklyn straight boy who likes to ask me, the queer roommate, about Grindr and blow jobs. He makes Roommate No. 1 livestream his video-game sessions, where he talks with his bros about other girls’ “tits.” She makes him dinner, then he critiques the dinner she's just wrecked our kitchen to make. (“It’s too tough,” he says of the boeuf bourguignonne. “That’s not the right way to defrost shrimp,” he barks about the scampi.) Late in the week, he makes her shave off her bush.

We’ve spent at least five hours a day watching Survivor. The magic of watching the contestants squabble and compete in ridiculous competitions is that at the end of every 40-minute episode, the tribe rallies tiki torches around someone to vote out. I realize that if anyone else was on this island,