Christy's Version:

"She f***in' hit me!  I couldn't believe what she and Blake were doing so I went over there and I told her off.  I mean, come on, dumping pizza boxes in Phil's room?  What are we, babies?  You throw them away.  It doesn't take that much effort.  I can't stand the way they mistreat Phil.  He's made to feel like a guest in his own home, y'know.  He's afraid to touch anything, and it's all Stacy's fault.  She has to have everything perfectly clean for her allergies.  She doesn't have allergies, what she has is psych problems.  I told her next time she's in the hospital she should get a psych evaluation...

... And that's when she hit me."

Stacy's Version:

"I have to tell you what happened last night.  We were all at the apartment when Christy shows up and just starts yelling at me!  She was blaming me for Blake wanting to keep the apartment clean, and for him not letting Phil sublet his room--stuff that had nothing to do with me.  I don't know where she gets off saying that's my fault.  So I pretty much just ignored her, but she wouldn't stop.  Then she started saying stuff to Erica like, 'How would you like to know that Stacy and your brother have sex all the time?' which is completely untrue!  She said other things, too, really crude, horrible things.  I was so upset I was shaking.  I kept telling her to leave, but she wouldn't go.  She just kept saying stuff.  And you know what she said after that?  She said that I don't really have allergies, and that she and Marie brought Marie's cat up there to prove it...

... And that's when I hit her."

Blake had everybody over for a party one weekend.  While we were there, Stacy told us about the allergy attack she had had earlier that day, and their frantic search for anything in the apartment that could have caused it.  They found what looked like cat hair on one of the chairs, but they couldn't be sure.  After all, how could cat hair have gotten into the apartment?  There was too much of it to have come off someone's clothes.  Erica thought it might have been fibers from a fuzzy blanket she had.

Phil and Christy showed up later with some friends, and ordered pizza since they hadn't eaten.  At the end of the night, the two of them took everybody home, but left the pizza boxes for someone else to clean up.  Exasperated, Blake took the pizza boxes and all the trash that had been left out by his roommate, and dumped it in Phil's room.  He may as well have lit a fuse.

There was the issue over the pot.  Who knew such turmoil could develop over one cooking implement?  According to Christy, Blake called Phil when he was out one night and demanded that he come to the apartment and clean a pot left in the sink.  One pot.  It seemed a ridiculous request.  According to Stacy, Christy and Phil cooked dinner at the apartment all the time and never cleaned up after themselves.  And it wasn't one pot, it was a whole sinkful that had been left there for days and was starting to stink.  Blake was tired of cleaning up after Phil, and for once wanted Phil to take responsibility for his own mess.  Christy blamed Stacy for Blake's relatively recent dedication to cleanliness.

Blake's sister Erica came to stay with them for the summer.  Blake bought her a futon and rigged up the dining room of their small apartment as a bedroom for her.  Since she didn't have a job yet, and because she was family, Blake wouldn't let her pay anything in the way of rent.  This did not go over so well with Phil.  He felt like a guest in his own apartment, that he would be intruding if he just wanted to watch TV in the living room.  It didn't seem fair that Erica could take over half the common area and stay rent-free, while he struggled to afford the smaller of the two bedrooms.

Then Phil had an idea.  If he could sublet his room for the summer while he stayed at Christy's, he might be able to recoup a little money and make some headway on his debt.  There didn't seem to be any other options open to him.  He ran it by Blake... and Blake said no.

Phil's lack of fiscal prowess was a real problem for Christy.  She wanted a guy who could take care of her, and that meant financially, among other things.  "He says he wants to marry me, but he can't even pay his cable bill, let alone afford a ring," she lamented.  She wanted Phil to get a better job.  She was tired of paying for things.

Phil's mom and step-dad saw the pressure Christy was putting on him and branded her a gold-digger.  They said they would give him the money he needed if he would break up with her.  He refused.

There are some who maintain that Phil never drank before he and Christy started dating.  Maybe it was just something else he hid from the rest of us.  Whatever their individual habits were before, the amount of alcohol they consumed respectively appeared to increase when they were together.

Phil began to stay over at Christy's more and more.  It started out of necessity--Christy would get trashed when they went out, so he had to stay and take care of her.  After a while, he stopped going home altogether, only stopping by when the apartment was empty to pick up clothes and whatnot.  He didn't want to face the problems there.  His avoiding them only made them worse.

She didn't want anyone to know they were dating.  Stacy called it from the very beginning, but no one really paid that much attention to her.  She was always premature in her predictions about other people's love lives.  Just to be safe, Christy spread her own counter-rumor:  "If you hear anything about me and Phil dating, just quash it.  It's not true."  For months, the more astute of us suspected something, while the more naïve acted as Christy's information ministers, reporting facts that belied what was right in front of our eyes.

No one quite knew what to do with Marie.  Much of our shared knowledge of her came in the form of rumors and stories from not exactly reliable sources.  One such anecdote involved Blake and a strip poker game.  Was she naked?  Was he naked?  Was there alcohol involved?  Who knows.  It was enough to make Stacy break up with him, though.  For a whole week.  That was early on in their relationship.  Ever since, Stacy suspected Marie of having designs on her boyfriend.  It didn't help that Marie lived in the same building as Blake and Phil.  One floor down.

It seemed obvious that Marie just needed friends.  We tried to be nice to her, but we just couldn't ever find much in common with her.  Her expression was so hard to read; you never knew what she was thinking.  The only person who seemed to have any success was Christy.  She took Marie under her wing and they became nearly inseparable for a while.

Blake loved Stacy.  But he couldn't say it.  He especially couldn't say it in front of other people, with Stacy nagging, "Blaaake, tell them!  Tell them how much you love me!"  He was whipped, but he wouldn't acknowledge defeat openly.  He still had his pride.  He needed her, but he hated that he needed her.  She was the needy one, not him.  Everyone could see that.  What everyone couldn't see was how she took care of him emotionally, the depth and character of their relationship when they were alone together.  No one could see that.

A typical guy, he still had it in the back of his mind that he was holding out for the perfect girl.  That's why he took forever to say those three words for the first time, and why he kept balking at the idea of marriage.  But eventually he realized that he couldn't live without Stacy.  They were each other's support, their balance.  If Stacy would have just quit asking him when he was going to propose, he might have been able to propose.

Blake and Phil were best friends all through college.  They had roomed together since then.  They looked a little like the Odd Couple, but we never thought anything would come between them.  It was only later that we found out Phil was having money troubles.  Or, more accurately, money troubles were having him.  The cable was disconnected because he hadn't paid the bills.  He was late with the rent.  His name wasn't even on the lease because his credit rating was so poor.  He'd been living beyond his means for a long time.  He hid it well.

Christy didn't like Stacy from the start.  We don't know why.  Maybe it was because of all the attention Stacy got.  All the attention she called to herself.  She was always having some crisis of health:  severe asthma, severe allergies, severe UTI's... Was it that Christy resented her oft-repeated litany of ailments, or the fact that Blake always humored her?  He dutifully carried her to and from the emergency room, took care of her at home, administered her meds, vacuumed and scrubbed every inch of her apartment--and his--so that not a single allergen would have a chance of touching her.  He did it all without hesitation; he was her boyfriend.