When our group finally secured our apartment last spring, it was not our first choice. Not even our second. Still, I was excited to move in the following fall with my friends. This was a MAJOR upgrade from my shared dorm freshman year. We were going to have a living room AND a kitchen. Life was good, I was happy. As I counted down the days until move in I was imagining the five of us (yes, you read that correctly -- FIVE) staying up late watching movies and chatting in the living room. We would have weekly "family" dinners and set a cute table. Sophomore year was the year of bonding and freedom.

Boy, was I wrong.

A few days before move in I checked the floor plan of the building (that's a totally normal thing to do, right?) and saw that we were the only five-bedroom in the building. The living room was smaller than the others but it didn't bother us too much.

Fast forward to August 17, 2016. I get my keys and head straight into my new apartment and I am greeted by the fresh scent of...hamster (this is foreshadowing in its finest form). Not what I was expecting but it's okay, still grooving. I notice that my "living room" is more of a walk-in closet with one recessed light in the corner and an unnecessarily deep skylight. No windows for us. I was underwhelmed, to say the least. Additionally, the apartment was on the seventh level of hell temperature-wise. I get it, it's Charleston, South Carolina in August, but DAMN I was sweating. We had the air conditioning men come check our thermostat and the only thing that could be done was to override the system and allow us to set the air conditioning to 70 degrees instead of the 72 degrees that it was locked on. Other than the bummer of a living and dining area and the air conditioner, it was still a pretty okay place.

That is until November 13, 2016, the day all hell broke loose. On this fall Sunday morning we discovered what no group of females would ever want to find in their home...that's right, we had a RAT. The rat, Richard is his name (because he's a d*ck), had made his way through our kitchen, down the hall and into one of the bedrooms, creating a huge mess. Immediately work orders were placed and all doors were locked. We lived in fear and horror for the next two and a half weeks. The day we found a massive half eaten pear on our counter top we knew we were dealing with the rat king himself. Traps were left out by exterminators but Richard was both too large and too smart for them. Four traps were placed and three had been set off and drug around the apartment. The father of one of my roommates so graciously came and cleaned multiple times and covered Richard's entrance hole under the cabinets with a piece of wood (thank you so much, you were a rockstar, Mr. Dantzscher). However, the first piece of wood did not last a day as Slick Rick chewed a hole through that almost immediately (when did he have time to sleep?), the wood was later replaced with more wood reinforced with a metal sheet. For the next week and a half, we could hear little (big) Richard trying desperately to escape. Day after day we waited for maintenance to help us get rid of our rat. It did not happen. After hearing "Just let him out, the traps will get him" for the 15th time we knew he was too strong for the traps. We took matters into our own hands and we killed the b*tch. That's right. We put rat poison in that hole and took the risk of letting him die in the wall. Coincidentally that was the same day we were told that we had been relocated to new living arrangements until the end of the semester. When we left they opened the hole and waited for dear Richard to come out (he did not).

Let me tell you, our new home was SWANKY. It was a 200-year-old home turned into a bed and breakfast and then purchased by the College of Charleston to house the guests of the College. Each of us got our own room with a full bath. I was lucky enough to get the room with a living area and a separate entrance with a spiral staircase ( I am not going to lie to you, I felt like a real life princess). One downside to living in a very old home was that I had recently been introduced to the incredible television program that is Ghost Adventures and one night truly believed that there was a spirit in my room. Other than that good times were had by all.

When I returned to my sad apartment to drop some things off before Christmas break nothing was out of the ordinary and Richard was nowhere to be seen, I believed we were in the clear. WRONG AGAIN, GIRLY! January 2, 2017 I was greeted in my home by DOZENS of giant flies, not fruit flies, not common house flies but the kind of flies that feed off of dead animals. That's right Richard was still out here punking us even in the afterlife.

A maintenance request was put in and some magical fly spray was sprayed and the flies started dropping like...well...flies. The hole they came from was filled and only one or so flies came per day. Somehow four months later the flies still exist in our room, but fortunately, the magical bug spray is still in effect and we find at least one dead fly a day (I say that like it's a win but in reality, I wish there were zero dead flies in my kitchen right now).

In two days I will be moving out of the Rat Dungeon, as we call it, and will hopefully be able to repress these memories. Fingers crossed that next year is the real year for freedom and bonding.