My alien roommate

Dylan Hostetter, Opinions and Humor Editor

Living with a stranger is hard. You may have different tastes, different schedules or even different opinions on how long milk is good for after the expiration date. As long as it’s not solid, I’m drinking it — I hate to waste.

The worst roommate I ever had was during my freshman year. He slept on the bottom bunk wrapped in a blanket like a mummy and would awake violently whenever you got near him. Several late night trips to the bathroom landed me with a black eye and a busted lip.

It’s hard living with a stranger, but it’s even harder when they also happen to be an extraterrestrial. OK, OK, I know that sounds crazy, but I swear I’m not making this up.

It all started when I got a VCU Alert about a potential UFO sighting. It was the scariest alert I had received since that guy’s electric scooter was stolen. He found it a few minutes later a couple of yards down the street, but for a time it was a real nail biter!

I can’t believe it was a coincidence that the same day my new roommate shows up with nothing but a duffel bag and the shirt on his back. What kind of shirt, you ask? An E.T. T-shirt. I never trusted that weird looking alien — I’m convinced he wanted to eat Drew Barrymore. 

Aside from the T-shirt, his disguise couldn’t have been more obvious. He introduced himself as Albert Ian — “Al Ian.” That’s like if my name was “Hugh Man” — or if Michael Rao was named “Over Pade.”

I wouldn’t have minded so much that he was an alien if he wasn’t such a bad roommate. He was constantly holed up in his room with bright lights and loud sounds emanating from the crack below his door. Whenever I would knock, all I would get in return were angry yells in some strange tongue.

His diet was unlike anything I had ever seen. Our fridge smelled heinous and was constantly filled with cartons of strange looking fried bugs and colored pastes — and to think he once had the gall to complain about my tuna and cottage cheese.

There were so many other small things that made me sure he was an alien. For instance, one day I was able to sneak into his room while he was away. There, I found several posters of UFOs and maps of planets. Look, I get it — just because he has posters of UFOs on his wall doesn’t mean he’s an alien. I have a poster of Margot Robbie on my wall, but that doesn’t mean I’m Barbie.

But you can’t deny the pile-up of coincidences. His clothes, his diet, his choice of decoration — they all pointed to him being not from this Earth. I had to do something. I didn’t have the number for any Men in Black, so my best bet was the VCU Police.

Of course, they didn’t believe a word I said. Granted, it was the fifth time I called them complaining that my roommate was some kind of mythical creature. During my sophomore year, I was sure I was rooming with a werewolf. Once a month right around the full moon she would get really moody for a week for no apparent reason, and one time she even tried to bite me.

I had to take matters into my own hands. As I kicked down his bedroom door, my fears were confirmed. There, I found a small gray alien holding his human mask in his hands. If I’m being completely honest, I was shocked I was right. Most of my accusations turn out to be completely wrong — like that one time I thought my Uber driver was kidnapping me but really I just told him the wrong address.

He tried to play it off like it wasn’t a big deal that he was a three-foot-tall gray alien walking around every day in a human skin-suit. I told him I didn’t care so much that he was an alien so long as he didn’t try to probe me and promised to clean out the fridge.

From that moment on, we were the best of roommates. It turns out all we needed was to clear the air. I also found out the whole probing thing was a smear campaign created by the MIB. Aliens are less interested in probing and instead much more fascinated with the question of why human men still have nipples. I mean, would we look weird without them? Or would we not care because we never knew any different?

These are the questions that keep us up late at night now as we share a bowl of fried bugs — turns out they taste like chicken — and binge watch our favorite show: “Alf.” We’re pretty much best friends.

Editor’s Note: The characters and events depicted in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.