You know what they say: if you don’t have a weird roommate, you are the weird roommate.

I tip the contents of my laundry basket out on my bed and reach to turn up the volume on my speakers. My ‘Putting Clothes Away’ playlist—which features a lot of Adam Levine—is currently blasting out of the surround system. Along with my vintage record player, the speaker set is probably the only thing of value in my tiny, stuffy, and currently sweltering bedroom.

“Try to tell you no, ‘cause I’m busy folding up this dress. Try to tell you stop, ‘cause my laundry is all still a mess.”

The towel starts slipping off my head as I nod along to the beat of my improvised lyrics. I straighten it back in place and glance at the rest of my outfit—a ribbed green tank top, faded pink I’m-Down-To-My-Last-Pair-And-Desperate granny panties, and a Korean cloth face mask complete with nostril holes that makes me look like Voldemort had drunk sex with a mannequin.

Yeah, no way I’m the weird roommate.

In my defense, it’s too hot to wear actual clothes right now. All the apartments in this part of Montreal are ancient and impossibly cramped. It’s like the concept of ventilation didn’t exist in the 1950s. I’m considering putting wheels on my floor fan so I can cart it from room to room and have it blowing directly on me at all times.

“So I cross my heart and I start to fold, try to finish this laundry before I’m old.”

I spin around with a stack of t-shirts in my arms, swaying my hips as I sashay towards my closet.

“Looks like somebody’s having a good time.”

The t-shirts hit the floor and I literally jump several inches off the ground when my roommate, Stéphanie, appears in my open doorway, grinning as she shouts over the deafening volume of the song. I stand there staring for a moment and then glance down at myself, my cheeks burning so hot I swear they’re going to singe the mask.

“Oh, god, Stéphanie, hi. Um...”

I lunge towards the volume knob and crank it down until Adam Levine is just background noise.

“Cute outfit, Molly. I like the mask.” Stéphanie chuckles, her usually subtle Québécois accent coming out in full force when she says my name: Moe-LEE.

I wring my hands together, willing myself to form a complete sentence as the embarrassment opens up under me like a pit. My brain is no use in helping me claw my way out; all it has to offer right now are ‘um’s and ‘ah’s.

“I, um, I thought, ah, you were going to be at work all day. I’m s—so sorry about the music. I’ll turn it off right now.”

Stéphanie waves her hand. “Ҫa va, ҫa va. Leave it. I’m heading out again soon, and besides, who doesn’t like a little Maroon 5?”

She heads into the kitchen.

“Ha, yeah, right,” I answer.

You idiot. She already left. You don’t have to say anything else.

“My mom made granola bars,” Stéphanie calls from out of sight. “I’m leaving them here on the counter if you want some.”

I hear her bustling around the cupboards for a few minutes before she heads into her room.

Turds. I’ve never offered her food. Now I’m the selfish roommate who just eats everyone else’s snacks. I should bake cookies. Should I bake cookies today?

I stare down at the Maroon 5 album art on my phone screen, my mind going a mile a minute as my chest heaves in time with my breaths. We’ve been living together for well over a year now, and I still make a complete fool of myself in front of Stephanie at least six times a week. I start every Monday off thinking, ‘This is it. This is the week I’ll be cool and normal and prove that I can handle spontaneous social interaction.’

Clearly, that week is not this week.

I flick through my dozens of playlists and settle on the one called ‘Breathe, Molly. It’s Okay.’ Yes, I have a dedicated playlist for recovering from awkward moments. I actually have three of them, for varying levels of awkward.

Bon Iver starts crooning about howling winds, and I fill my lungs with as much air as they’ll take before exhaling in a satisfying gush. Two more big breaths and I’m ready to pick up my fallen t-shirts and get the rest of my laundry put away.

I peel off my face mask and rub the remaining serum into my skin. There’s supposed to be some sort of snail goo in it that will revitalize my youthful glow. My skin tone does look a bit more even, but at twenty-one years old, I don’t think my youthful glow—if I even have one—can get all that much more youthful.

I unwind the towel and squeeze the remaining moisture out of my hair before dragging a brush through it. There’s almost no point. The dark brown curls are untameable on a normal day. In the still-muggy air of early September, they become vicious and feral beasts. I just let them do what they want.

Beeep. Beeeeep.

My laptop starts wailing with the sound of an incoming video call. I glance at the time. My daily chat with Justine isn’t supposed to start for another ten minutes, but she’s one of those people who believes that early is on time and on time is late.

I drop into a seated position on my mattress and cross my legs, pulling the computer onto my lap and hitting the ‘Accept’ button. Justine’s face materializes on the screen, her rows of tight black braids threaded with new copper strands and pulled into a huge bun on top of her head.

“Helloooo Molly, the hottest tamale.”

Her voice comes out tinny through her microphone.

“Hey Justine, queen of the scene.”

We made that greeting up when we were seventeen and got tipsy off wine for the first time at Justine’s mom and step-dad’s wedding. For some completely unjustified and regrettable reason, it stuck.

“I like the new do,” I tell her.

“You noticed!” Her smile is quickly followed by a groan. “I hate getting my braids done, though. It takes for-fucking-ever. You look hot, by the way.”

“Oh, thanks.” I reach up to pat my cheek. “I just did a Korean face mask with snail extract in it.”

Justine shakes her head. “No, like, you literally look hot. I don’t know how you’re surviving in that place without air conditioning.”

“I’m not surviving. I’m slowly dying, day by day, hour by hour...” I flip myself onto my stomach and adjust the laptop screen. “I’m like that episode where Patrick and SpongeBob get stuck on dry land and start shrivelling up.”

“That wasn’t an episode; that was the SpongeBob movie,” Justine corrects, and then starts imitating SpongeBob’s wheezy and dehydrated voice as she begs, “Water! Water!”

This girl gets me.

We’ve been best friends since the first week of ninth grade. Justine’s parents made her take an art course to ‘balance out’ all of the math and science she loaded up on, while I had to plead with my mom to let me take the class. Justine and I sat next to each other, and when she saw some of my drawings, she begged me to help save the integrity of her 98.9% average by giving her art tips.

“Well, the silver lining is that in just a few weeks, I’ll be freezing my ass off in here once the fall weather hits,” I add. “As Stéphanie and I learned last year, the heating in here sucks as much as the ventilation.”

Some nights I would have to wear my coat while studying.

“How are things going with Stéphanie?” Justine asks.

I shrug. “She walked in on me singing my laundry song in my underwear. I had my disturbing face mask on too. I think I might be the weird roommate, Justine.”

She laughs while shaking her head. “Oh my little tamale, there is no alternate universe in which you aren’t the weird roommate.”

I drop my head onto my comforter and groan. Even my best friend agrees that I’m a freak. At least she loves me for it.

“Has Mr. Rock Star been walking around shirtless lately?” Justine asks, while my face is still pressed into the blanket.

I try to brace myself against it, but my mood plummets as fast and hard as the temperatures we were talking about. All it takes is one casual reminder that he exists and my mind flits right to the stack of posters featuring his photo I still have hidden among all the other crap under my bed.

Ace Turner is the reason I used to have an ‘I’m In Love With My Roommate’s Boyfriend’ playlist.

I know love is a bit of an overstatement; ‘enamoured’ or ‘infatuated’ would be more accurate, but you don’t obsess over someone for years like I did with Ace Turner and not feel justified in calling it something more.

The summer after we graduated high school, Justine and I were at a music festival in Ottawa, camped out in the front row as we spent all day waiting for The Lumineers to headline that night. We’d discovered pretty early on in our friendship that we were both music junkies, and neither of us even batted an eye at the idea of spending eight hours standing in place to get a good spot for a band we loved.

I always feel bad for the smaller acts at festivals, stuck with a shitty afternoon slot and playing for a handful of people all obviously there for someone else. The first band to play that day was called Sherbrooke Station, and I’d never heard of them before.

When they walked on stage, my breath caught in my throat. When they launched into the first track of their set list, everything around me blurred. When their front man took the microphone in his hand and started to sing, I knew the rest of the male species had been ruined for me forever.

Sherbrooke Station didn’t even have a full length album back then, but from that day on, Justine and I became their number one fans, and Ace Turner became my number one fantasy.

I know every single lyric he’s ever written off by heart. I’ve read all his interviews. I’ve watched him perform from the front row seven times. I’m not naive or crazy enough to believe that actually counts as a connection, but part of me still felt like I knew him. Part of me felt like I understood. I’ve let his lyrics voice my sorrows when I couldn’t voice them myself. His songs have been the soundtrack to some of the best art I’ve ever created. I’ve let his music into a part of my heart no one else has ever seen, and I couldn’t help thinking that had to mean something.

Clearly the universe didn’t agree with me. In an inhumanely cruel twist of fate, Stéphanie bumped into Ace one day in Parc Lafontaine, and he clearly found her as entrancing as everyone else does. I’ve now spent almost a year being forced to listen to the man whose posters I used to have taped to my wall have sex with my roommate on the other side of it.

It’s a fun time.

Justine must be able to tell the direction my thoughts are turning in because she lets out a loud and exaggerated sigh.

“Molly Myers,” she chides, “don’t go getting all emo on me again. I’ve told you a million times already—your hideous and obnoxious roommate does not deserve Ace’s hot rock star ass, but until he figures that out, I want you to get the hell over yourself and take pictures of him shirtless for me. The internet needs this, Molly! Do it for the fans.”

I appreciate her effort, but we both know Stéphanie is the opposite of hideous and obnoxious. She’s a gorgeous, leggy blonde who teaches dance classes for a living and volunteers at a meditation centre in her spare time. She’s basically sunshine personified, and she’s never been anything but kind to the weird and awkward dweeb she shares an apartment with.

So kind I can’t even hate her, and part of me really wants to hate her.

“Look,” Justine continues, after realizing I’m not convinced, “I know you probably, like, pledged your virginity and everlasting fidelity to Ace or something, but I think you’re failing to realize that you’ve now got prime access to the three other insanely attractive guys in Sherbrooke Station. You should be focusing on getting one of them to bang you, or at the very least, bang me. What I wouldn’t give for a piece of Cole Byrne’s hot black ass, which”—she holds up a finger—“I am allowed to say, because I also have a hot black ass.”

I can’t fault her there. Every ass in Sherbrooke Station is hot. With their brooding bassist Cole, their infinitely charismatic drummer Matt, and their wild, man-bun sporting keyboardist JP, Sherbrooke Station is like one extra hot, tattoo-covered cake, and Ace Turner is most definitely the icing.

“Hey!” I protest, once the rest of Justine’s words catch up with me. “I am not a virgin.”

She smirks. “Sex toys don’t count, Molly.”

“I have had sex with an actual dick!” I shout.

There’s a laugh from the other side of my bedroom door.

“Turds,” I whisper-hiss, whipping my head around to face the noise.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Stéphanie announces from behind the door. “I was about to knock.”

I jump off the bed and lunge for the handle, revealing Stéphanie standing there in all her blonde and radiant glory, grinning from ear to ear.

“I’m hanging out at the park with Ace and some friends today,” she tells me. “I was just wondering if you wanted to come? I’m leaving in about ten minutes.”

“Oh, I, um...” I glance down at myself and realize I’m still in just my tank top and underwear.

God, she must think I’m a freak.

“S-studying,” I stammer. “Have to study. We...study.”

I gesture between me and my laptop like the grammarless caveman I turn into around all but five people in this world.

“Does that studying involve actual dicks?”

I go rigid with horror, rapidly replaying the last few minutes of Justine and I’s conversation and wondering at exactly which part Stéphanie started to overhear it. She knows I like Sherbrooke Station, but giving her direct vocal confirmation that I used to have a pathetic crush on her boyfriend would be reaching a new level of embarrassment, even by my standards.

The laugh that follows her questions fades when she notices I don’t join in. She reaches out and pats me on the shoulder.

“Sorry, Molly. I’m just joking around. I hope you’re able to study in this heat. I’ll see you later, okay?”

She gives me a little wave goodbye, and I only manage to return it once she’s already out the apartment door.

Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

The sound of Justine giving a pointed cough emits from my laptop.

“Hey. Still here.”

I whirl around and collapse onto my bed again.

“WHY?” I shout, stretching my arms up to the ceiling as I lie on my back. “Why can’t I communicate like a normal human being?”

“Because you’re secretly an alien,” Justine supplies.

I ignore her.

“Why is it so fucking hard for me?” I groan, before quickly pointing a finger at the computer. “And don’t say, ‘That’s what she said!’”

“Okay, I’ll just think it then.”

I drag my hands down my face. “You are the worst, Justine Muanda. I don’t know why I hang out with you.”

“You hang out with me because I am your soul mate and there is nothing you can do to deny it.” Now it’s her turn to point a finger at me. “So are you going to stop being a drama queen for five minutes, or do I have to come through this screen and push your awkward, bumbling, loveable ass off that bed and knock some sense into you?”

I really do wish she could come through the screen right now, even if it resulted in me getting my ass kicked. We moved to different cities for university, and not a day goes by when I don’t wish I could have her by my side. Tackling social anxiety is a lot easier when you’ve got a best friend at your back, but part of the reason I came to Montreal was to prove to myself that I could do things on my own. I could have followed Justine to Kingston and spent four years rooming with her, living in the same bubble as ever, but I chose not to let my fucked up brain get the best of me, no matter how many embarrassing moments it resulted in along the way.

“I could maybe hold back on the drama queen thing for five minutes,” I tell her, “but that’s it, so say whatever you’ve got to say now.”

“Good. I need you to help me figure out my scheduling conflict. Do I keep taking Practical Biochemistry on Monday mornings, or do I switch it out for Intro to Environmental Toxicology and get a head start on my requisites for next year?”

We’re only a week into the semester, and she’s already talking about getting a head start on next year. As a sociology major with a minor in art history, I don’t have much to contribute to the conversation besides agreeing that a hot TA is most definitely a good enough reason to stay in a class.

“Molly! Hello, Earth to Molly!”

I stop absently nodding when I notice Justine waving at me on the screen.

“I just asked you what else you’re doing today. That’s requires more than a nod for an answer.”

“Oh, right. Uh...I’m probably going to eat food?”

Justine snorts and then adjusts her computer screen so she can see me better.

“You okay, girl?” she asks. “I know I told you I was going to kick your ass if you kept whining, but if you really have a problem, you know you can talk to me, right?”

“I know. I’m fine. Really.”

Sometimes my awkward encounters—like the one I just had with Stéphanie—send me into this downward spiral of self-loathing that makes it hard to concentrate on anything other than what a fool I’ve made of myself. I know it’s unhealthy and self-indulgent, but it’s a track my brain seems to run on default. Conversations are like quicksand for me: I start to struggle when I realize I’m sinking, and that just sucks me even farther down into the mud.

“Okay,” Justine says skeptically. “You’re a hot tamale, girl. It doesn’t matter what other people think, as long as you believe that’s true.”

I wave her encouragement off. “You sound like you’re giving a cheesy TED Talk, but thanks.”

“You just wait. One day I will be giving a TED Talk, and it will not be cheesy at all.”

I don’t doubt that. I’m surprised her school hasn’t already made her some kind honorary professor. They’ve already given her a full scholarship and a resume’s worth of awards.

“Is it noon already?” I ask, glancing at the clock at the bottom of my screen. “I haven’t eaten anything besides a banana today. I should probably refuel myself before it gets too hot to move.”

“And I should get back to my essay,” Justine adds.

I don’t bother asking how she’s already got an essay to start this early in the school year. She’s probably working on plans for her doctorate before even finishing her undergrad.

“I’ll talk to you on Wednesday,” she tells me. “Love you, girl!”

“Back at ya, you nerd.”

She ends the call and the video window goes black. I sit up and consider putting pants on, but end up trudging to the kitchen in my granny panties to see if I can find something to cook.