For one, he asked me one day a couple months into our year together whether girls could sleep in my bed when I wasn’t there. I went home every other weekend (because I was cool), and left behind a perfectly empty bed. So, Troy asked, if I wasn’t there, could any of his lady friends use my bed? Of course, the bro thing to do would’ve been to say “Yes, of course, your strange drunken conquests can totally sleep on my Egyptian cotton, twelve-hundred-thread-count Nate Berkus bedsheets, that’s what I bought them for!” But I couldn’t get over the image of some blasted freshman throwing up on my memory foam pillows the second Troy pulled down his pants. Besides, I wondered, why would someone as ostensibly accomplished with the opposite sex need a separate bed to store his concubines? I wasn’t exactly roping in ass myself, but I knew, generally speaking, that sleeping in the same bed was typically part of the deal. So I said no, I’d rather he didn’t let anybody sleep in my bed while I was away, or sit on it, or even look at it, because the fabric was too delicate for anybody whose skin composition didn’t exactly match mine. He resented me for denying his request, and I resented him for making the request in the first place, ensuring that every time I returned from a weekend away, I’d be forced to sniff my pillows for sweaty residue left by some intoxicated skank.

In any case, I never saw Troy with a girl, which was fine by me, but flew in the face of his air of utter superiority and the clear importance he put on his sexual domination. He’d brag about the women he’d met at this party or that, but as far as I could tell, nothing ever came of it. Of course, I’m not judging the lack of sex. I spent most of my college nights eating shitty pizza, playing video games, and crushing on straight boys from inside the closet. Troy just got on my goddamn nerves, like a hangnail I was forced to live with, a nagging discomfort that grew more and more unbearable each day. I started begrudging the way he smacked while he ate, the pungent smell of his deodorant after he came back from the shower, and his never-ending cough, a dull “HEGH” that I’d thought was from a simple cold when we first moved in, but that persisted day after day for the entire year, a constant “HEGH” “HEGH” “HEGH” every fifteen minutes until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

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