Being the part in which I spend the night with her, and also in which we conclude our story.

The previous chapter's Goldilocks and The Three Bears incidents ("Someone's been sleeping in my bed!") happened at the beginning of the week, on Monday and Tuesday morning. The rest of the week turned out to be unusually quiet. Fat Indian Bitch was exactly as one might hope a roommate to be. She was friendly, but she was leaving me alone.

When I'd wake up in the evening, she'd say hello… and then return to what she was doing. She was friendly, civil, and completely normal. Things were blissfully sane at my house. There wasn't a trace of creepiness. For the first time, I felt like we were proper roommates instead of predator and prey.

All in all, it turned out to be a very pleasant week. I moved into the weekend feeling pretty good about my home life. On Saturday night, the four of us went in on a pizza. We sat around the living room nursing beers and playing Cruisin' USA on my Nintendo 64.

Around 10, Lazy Roomie decided to turn in. He and I were the only ones playing games, so I decided to head to my room, too. Even though Saturday was one of my days off, I was usually in the habit of staying awake until morning. I set a CD playing softly and loafed on the bed with a book. I read for about thirty minutes when I heard a knock on the door.

"Yes?"

"Hello?"

It was FIB. "What is it?"

"Can I come in?"

I didn't quite know what to make of this. I was elated that she was finally respecting my space enough to ask, but I had no idea what the hell she wanted.

"Hello?" she said again.

"Yeah?"

"Can I come in?"

"Uhh… I suppose."

She came in and spent a moment looking around like she'd never seen the place. She gestured at my crappy folding wooden chair. "Can I sit down?"

"I suppose."

She sat and asked me what I was reading. I held up my book so she could see the cover. (In case you're wondering, it was John Leo's Two Steps Ahead of The Thought Police.)

"Oh," she said. "What kind of book is that?"

"Social commentary. It's a bit conservative, but it's insightful and kind of funny."

"Oh. Not my kind of book."

"FIB, what do you want?"

"I'm bored. LR went to bed and Lazy-Eyed Nottie fell asleep in the living room."

"And what do you want from me?"

"Well, I thought maybe we could hang out."

"Umm…" I had no idea what to do. What was this all about? I thought about my answer long enough to make the silence uncomfortable, which in itself is a strong message. In the end I decided to see if we could actually be friends. "Yeah alright," I finally said.

The rest of the night went surprisingly well. We listened to music, smoked cigarettes, and talked. A lot of it was mindless small talk. We talked about movies. (She tends to favor mainstream comedies, the stupider the better.) We talked about music. (Her favorite song is "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails.) We talked about books. (This part of the conversation was very one-sided, because apparently she'd never read anything that wasn't required by a teacher.) We talked about jobs. (Also one-sided, as she'd never had one.)

It was a good conversation. She didn't seem so much like a stalker as she did a friend. As night turned into morning, she became visibly more and more tired. Around dawn she could barely keep her eyes open and I told her it was time to leave. She seemed grateful, almost as if I was the one keeping her. She shuffled away and I shut the door behind her.

I was pretty happy about the way things turned out. We talked as friends, as equals. She gave no hint of her crush on me, if she indeed still had one. I went to sleep that morning feeling immensely relieved.

The next night was something else entirely. I'd slept earlier than usual, so I woke around 6 in the evening. I showered, made something to eat, and still had a few hours to kill before work.

My three roommates were watching Ace Ventura (a tape from FIB's collection), so I sat on the couch to watch it with them. I noticed disdainfully that FIB and LEN were swapping their damn notebook back and forth, something I hadn't seen them do for a few weeks.

Eventually, the notebook was passed to me. I'd never really participated in their note passing sessions. For a long while, they'd stopped passing me the notebook. That FIB was trying to suck me into note writing again seemed very disturbing. This was the kind of thing that we'd left behind weeks ago. I assumed that this was some kind of sign that the previous night's normalcy was anything but normal. We'd had a perfectly normal conversation, the kind of conversation that any two people might have. Thousands of roommates were probably having that same conversation at the same time. Unfortunately, I think FIB read far more into that conversation than was ever intended.

Crestfallen, I took the notebook. Written there in a girl's loopy script, in pink ink even, was the simple question "What do you really think of me?"

I read the question twice, hoping it would change into something different with a repeated reading. She was looking at me with an expectant, hopeful look on her face. It was time to end things. "Give me the pen," I sighed.

I wrote exactly what I thought of her. I pulled no punches. I was harsh. I don't remember verbatim what I wrote, but I recall using words like "ignorant," "obsessive," and "irritating." I wrote that I was not interested in her. This was probably at least the tenth time I'd told her this, but this was the first time I'd done so using words like "childish" and "completely unattractive to me."

With her silly pink pen, I wrote probably fifty words in all. About thirty of them were unfriendly adjectives. I passed the notebook back to her. She read it without a word. Her cheeks began coloring impressively. She started to cry. After a few minutes, she wrote me a short response: "Is this really how you feel?"

I handed the notebook back without writing anything. I simply said, "Yes, that's how I feel."

She sat there crying for a few more minutes. Lazy Roomie and Lazy-Eyed Nottie must've guessed what had just happened because they both did an excellent job pretending not to see us. After almost ten minutes of crying, FIB jumped up from the couch.

She stomped into the kitchen, returning a moment later with our box of trash bags. She began stuffing all her possessions into the bags. The three of us watched silently. FIB never brought much into the house so she didn't have much to pack. After two and a half bags she was done. She grabbed her coat and her car keys and stormed out the door. She never returned. Later in the week Lazy Roomie (whom you may recall is FIB's half-brother) told me that FIB had returned home to live with her parents again.

So that was it. It was finished. FIB was gone for good. It was more than eight years until I saw her again, and that was just a chance encounter in a parking lot where I don't believe she even saw me.

Things were finally resolved. And all it took was for me to be more deliberately vicious and mean-spirited than I'd ever been before, or ever been since.

THE END?