Okay, my turn:
First year, I lived in a residence hall that was one step up from the "traditional" style of residence hall. Instead of having huge floors of single and double rooms, with communal bathrooms, everyone had a single room, with a bathroom in between every two rooms (accessible only through said rooms), and it was divided into "blocks" of three floors, with eight people living on each floor. Anyway, our floor consisted of six girls (we ended up being really close), and two guys, who were complete polar opposites, but were forced into being bogmates (i.e. the term for two people sharing a bathroom) because they were, of course, the only two guys on our floor. How were they so different? Well, for the purposes of this story, let's call them Goofus and Gallant. Now, Gallant was polite, quiet, clean, and his room was always so immaculate, you could eat your dinner off the floor, and bounce quarters off his bed. Goofus, however, was the complete opposite.
Rather than actually attending classes, Goofus would routinely sleep in until noon or so, roll out of bed, and then go out with his friends to smoke, and sell, various controlled substances, chiefly marijuana. He didn't eat in the dining hall, or purchase his own food at the grocery store (we didn't have kitchens, but we all had sinks, mini-fridges, microwaves, toasters, etc.), but rather, he preferred to order copious quantities of take-out food from various local establishments. So, on any given evening, his room (and, by extension, our entire hall) would REEK of grease, weed, and (on the rare occasion when Goofus and his friends felt they needed some green vegetables) Caesar salad....the latter of which was once left overturned in an open take-out container on the floor outside my room (he lived across the hall from me), for two or three days. Also, Goofus' attitudes towards cleanliness and picking up after himself were, shall we say, lacksadaisical at best. It was literally impossible to see the floor in his room, and on one occasion, after he'd claimed to have "lost" his keys for about three weeks, one of my friends from the first floor (who, along with another friend of hers, had put herself up for the task of sort of "babysitting" Goofus), found them on the floor right next to his nightstand, under a pile of accumulated junk.
Another time, I remember coming home after class, and I saw a strange middle-aged woman standing in the hall. She'd noticed some poems of mine that I'd posted on the outside of my bedroom door (I'd decorated it for "Celebrate Your Uniqueness" week, since I was actually into all that hokey crap then), and she approached me and said, "Those are really good, are you Freakyfemme?" (I'd put "Freakyfemme's Room" in big, colourful letters on my door, along with my poems, photos, and some other stuff, and she saw me about to go in there, so she put two and two together). Anyway, this woman went on to tell me that she was Goofus' mother, and she'd come to take care of Goofus for a little while, since he'd been sick (no wonder, living on take-out and reefer madness in an environment of abject squalor isn't really the healthiest thing to do). Anyway, she also wanted to make sure that, prior to this recent bout of illness, Goofus had been attending class regularly, and doing his homework. Well.....he hadn't. I knew that, Gallant knew that, everyone in our hall, and probably our BLOCK knew that, but Goofus' mother was completely unaware. In her mind, her precious son could do no wrong....and, I later heard from my friend who found Goofus' keys that Goofus was actually really intelligent, and he'd graduated from high school with about a 93% average, so he was capable of doing the work, he just chose not to once he got here.
After first year, I never saw Goofus again, and since my school is so tiny, I know that if he'd just moved off-campus, I would have seen him from time to time around school, so he must be really gone. That's one of the drawbacks of going to a small school, when someone drops out, EVERYBODY knows, and it's an item of gossip for a little while.....not malicious gossip, because that's not our style, but sort of pitied, hushed whispers, like people at a funeral. But, in a way, I think we *were* mourning the loss of something. Regardless of his habits, Goofus was one of us, and he had everything it took to succeed here, but he just chose to treat university as one big non-stop party, and as a result, karma bit him in the backside. We'd all heard stories of that kind of thing happening, but after it happened right before our eyes, I think we all took it that much more seriously.
