This happened on Thursday.
The dorm TVs operate on a first-come, first-serve basis. Unless, of course, the people who get there first are not declared "cool" by the witch. My friend, henceforth referred to as A, and I were there first, getting there right when school let out and laying claim to the TV with her DVDs of Alias. Then N entered a while later and demanded that we relinquish the TV to her. Didn't even ask politely, just said "You've had it for an hour and half, now get off and give me the TV." Yes, we'd been using it for a while, but her crowd had been using it every day from 4:15 to 7:00, and this was the first time A and I had taken it this year.
So I refused. I told her flat-out "No. We were here first, and if the positions were reversed, you wouldn't leave. So why should I do you any favors?" (I am sophomore, A and N are freshmen. A let me take the lead here for this reason.) At this point, N's friend S (a senior) came into it, on her side, telling me I had attitude. Imagine that, me, with attitude! I didn't develop attitude until a bit later in the story. A jumped in here and told S to get lost, whereupon S told her that this was between N and me, and to stay out of it. A asked her what she was doing, then, and S said that she was helping out someone cool. A said that that's what she was doing, too.
So we get into a really heated verbal clash, which I won't recount word-for-word because I don't remember all of it. Now we come to my etiquette breach, using that b-word. (Yes, I know, I should keep a better rein on my temper.) And she responds by saying that the last person to call her that got beat up within an inch of their life. Now, I know she can't do that to me in the middle of the dorm common room because I run rather than fight and dorm parents share a wall with the common room. They go away, we go back to watching. We finish our episode and leave them the TV, relocating to A's laptop, and probably would have moved right away if they'd asked politely.
I think N has a screw loose, though. This isn't the first example of weird behavior from her.
(We do have some basic, unwritten rules about fights like this one: it has to stay under the radar of the dorm parents at all costs. All participants in the fight will work together to that end or we'll all get in trouble, and probably the rest of the dorm too- including people who weren't even in the dorm, much less the room, at the time of the fight. The adults are bent on using peer pressure to stamp out fights, but really it just ensures that the adults never hear about the fights and thus are less aware of the problems- and they're so convinced that their eyes over the dorm are omniscent that they don't believe us when we tell them there are fights they don't see.)
