By the second day, my apartment didn’t feel like mine anymore.
Vanessa’s presence expanded. Her things multiplied. A jacket draped over the dining chair. Makeup and brushes spread across the coffee table like spilled confetti. Shoes left in the middle of the hallway, forcing me to step around them. A damp towel abandoned on the bathroom floor.
Each small mess felt like a message: I don’t have to respect your space.
In the kitchen, she cooked like she was filming a lifestyle video, music playing from her phone, pans clanging, cabinets opening and closing with careless force. She made elaborate meals in the middle of the day, ingredients spread out like a storm. And when she finished, she left everything.
The sink filled with dishes, greasy and stacked. Pots with sauce drying on the sides. Utensils thrown in like she expected them to disappear.
“Vanessa,” I said the first time, trying to keep my tone neutral. “Can you clean up after you cook?”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said without looking up, already scrolling her phone. “Later.”
Later never came.
The apartment smelled like garlic and stale food. The kitchen, once my calm corner where I meal-prepped on Sundays, became a place I avoided.
My utility bills jumped so fast it made my stomach drop when the statements arrived.
Vanessa took hour-long showers. I could hear the water running behind the bathroom door while I sat at the kitchen table, jaw clenched, thinking about the cost. She left lights on in every room. The television played all day, a constant stream of reality shows, even when she wasn’t watching. She cranked the heat until the air felt thick, tropical, as if she were trying to turn my apartment into a greenhouse. I’d come home from work sweating under my coat, the heat blasting, Vanessa nowhere in sight.
When I showed her the bills, laying them out on the table like evidence, she barely glanced at them.
“I don’t have money,” she said, matter-of-fact. “You know I’m broke. I’ll help when I start working again.”
“When you start working again,” I repeated.
She gave me a sweet smile, the kind that was meant to disarm. “I’m figuring it out.”
But she wasn’t figuring anything out.
She slept until noon most days. I’d leave for work in the morning and she’d be in bed. I’d come home and she’d be in the same place on the sofa, hair in a messy bun now, wearing my robe like it belonged to her. She would watch TV, scroll her phone, laugh into it, text friends.
Sometimes she went out at night, dressed like she had somewhere important to be, leaving behind the heat cranked up and the lights blazing.
When I asked about job applications, she waved me off with vague language.
“I’m exploring my options,” she said, like she was a consultant deciding between offers, not an unemployed person who’d been evicted.
Meanwhile, my routines eroded. My office was no longer mine, so I tried to squeeze work into my bedroom. I balanced my laptop on my knees, took calls with my back against the headboard, hoping my voice sounded professional while my sister’s laughter floated through the walls. I tried working at the kitchen table, but the kitchen was often dirty, cluttered, loud.
What made it worse was how casually she took from me.
I came home one afternoon and found her wearing my favorite sweater, the soft gray one I’d bought after a promotion, a small reward I’d justified to myself because I never bought myself anything. She wore it like it was hers.
“That’s my sweater,” I said, and my voice shook with a kind of shock that surprised even me.
She looked down at it, then back up at me. “Oh. I just grabbed it. It was in the closet.”
“It’s in my closet.”
“We’re sisters,” she said, shrugging. “I thought sharing was normal.”
It wasn’t just clothes. It was my skincare, the expensive face cream I used sparingly because it cost too much. I’d find the jar open, fingerprints in it. It was my meal-prepped lunches, carefully portioned containers I’d stacked in the fridge. I’d open the fridge in the morning and see one missing.
“Did you eat my lunch?” I asked once, incredulous.
Vanessa smiled, chewing. “I was hungry.”
