“The rodent population that has infested our house is definitely comprised not of a band of mice,” one of Jia Tolentino’s college roommates wrote to their building Listserv, “but of a band of large and multiplying RATS.”
In 2007, the year I lost my dignity, I was a junior at the University of Virginia, living in a seven-bedroom flophouse with my best friends. The place was a nondescript peach color on the outside, wood-panelled on the inside, and sat at the top of a large hill. The previous inhabitants had called it Fuckingham Palace; the seven of us rechristened it Beowulf, after the fake English study group I invented so that we could have our own official U.V.A. Listserv.
Most of Beowulf lived upstairs, where the amenities included a bathroom that grew its own mushrooms. Downstairs, it was just two of us: me, in a room whose floor was so uneven that the furniture sometimes migrated, and Ryan, a quiet guitar enthusiast whose pretty girlfriends could often be heard falling, around 3, out of his twin bed. One night toward the end of November, Ryan made an announcement. “I think we might have rats,” he said. The rest of us weren’t convinced.
Just as there are stages of grief, there are stages of living with a bunch of rats. First, we fought them. We tried drowning one in a garbage can but it kept surfacing, buoyant as a rubber duck. Then, for a while, we attempted bargaining. One evening, the women of Beowulf returned home to find all the men on top of the couch, shrieking at a rat as it toddled, slightly poisoned, across the floor. Two weeks in, we were deep in denial.
By the three-week point, our nightmares were Borgesian—mazes of rats, libraries of rats, deserts in which each grain of sand was a rat. Juli spent a night in silent panic, imagining rats rising to the level of her bunk bed, like a warming sea. Finally, we gathered the miscellaneous alcohol, cried a little, and acquiesced to our conquerors. We named them all Buster Baxter. Then, since the holidays were near, we threw away as many of our possessions as we could and left.
When we got back in January, the house felt empty. There were no more rats. They were dead all around us, we assumed, like leaves. We got used to telling the story of the rats like it was funny—except, always, instead of laughing, people would back away. In the spring, one Sunday, the four girls went to a crappy tattoo parlor a mile away from Beowulf, where we shook hands with a sweet, large man named Carly, who told us he did everything but eyelids. “I’m done with those,” he said wearily.
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