Last spring, my boyfriend sublet a spare room in his apartment to an aspiring model. The roommate was young and made us feel old, but he was always game for a bottle of wine in the living room, and he seemed to like us, even though he sometimes suggested that we were boring or not that hot.
One night, he and my boyfriend started bickering about which Lorde album is better, the first one or the second one. This kind of argument can be entertaining if the participants are making funny or interesting points, but they weren't, and they wouldn't drop it. The roommate was getting louder and louder; my boyfriend was repeating himself. It was Friday; I was tired. I snapped and said, loudly, "This conversation is dumb, and I don't want to keep having it." I knew it was rude, but I thought it was expedient, eldest-sibling rude. So I was sort of shocked when the roommate got up without a word, went into his room, slammed the door, and never spoke to me again.
Though he lived in the apartment for several more months, I saw him only one other time, on the way to the bathroom. We didn't make eye contact. Another time, I was on a Zoom call in the living room and heard, from behind his closed bedroom door, the Avril Lavigne song "Girlfriend," the chorus of which is a peppy "Hey, hey, you, you, I don't like your girlfriend," playing at a pointed volume. Eventually, my boyfriend texted him to see if he would talk about the situation. He replied that there wasn't much to say, except one thing: "Your girlfriend is toxic," he warned, followed by an emoji of a monkey covering its face.
This story is from the September 2022 edition of The Atlantic.
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This story is from the September 2022 edition of The Atlantic.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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