She wasn't the dancing type. She needed to be intoxicated or out of her mind or extremely dislocated to dance. She needed to be hopped up on her little brother's Ritalin or on her way to another place with a hit of LSD or just totally and utterly fucked up from anything she could get her hands on that night in order to dance. And that didn't happen very often.

What type was she then? That is an incredibly loaded question and one that could take years of psychiatric analysis. But I'm willing to do my best to describe her.

Okay, let's see, she didn't dance, she didn't sing, she didn't draw or paint or sculpt anything. She wasn't exactly artistic. She didn't play soccer or baseball or any sports for that matter. She didn't like to read or do homework. She didn't really like to talk on the phone or over the computer. She wasn't a big talker. She could care less about fashion and makeup wasn't really an issue. She was terrible at math and music wasn't really her thing.

Okay so you are probably thinking this is a really passive aggressive way to describe what someone is like. I guess I thought if I made a list of all the things she wasn't that would help me figure out what she was. But people are more complicated than that, right? You can't just cancel things out until you are left with a human being. It doesn't work like that.

Well, than you are going to have to forgive me because I don't know her any better than you do. I can try again to tell you what I know and let you put the details together any way you want but I'm not making any promises. Knowing if someone is introverted or extraverted isn't going to help you understand why she does what she does. I've seen shows about profiling; how the FBI finds serial killers by analyzing the way they kill and leave the body. As if only a closeted gay man is capable of putting makeup on a woman after strangling her. As if superficial things like these really offer insight into a person's mind and how they function.

She is not the type of person that can be profiled. She made mistakes in her life, but who hasn't? Okay, so maybe her mistakes were a little more monumental than most but it wasn't like she ever killed anyone. At least not on purpose.

I know I'm stalling, but can you blame me? I'm doing my best, cut me a little slack here.

She was complicated. I'm not sure where to start. The beginning is usually a good place but not for her. Not much happened at the beginning, not much that mattered anyway.

She was a happy child, ate her vegetables and played tag in the backyard with the neighborhood kids. She liked to finger paint and sneak cookies when her mom wasn't paying attention, which was often. Her mother was always busy with redecorating, PTA meetings and Tupperware parties. She was a real live desperate housewife. Minus the desperate part.

She had a happy beginning, but then again, a lot of people do. Does that make them a suspect for certain crimes? Does being slightly neglected but still fine make someone a potential serial killer, or arsonist, or suicide bomber? She wasn't any of those things, not really.

Being a teenager wasn't easy for her but that's nothing to get excited about. She didn't have many things she liked to do, other than the occasional hit of LSD or speed. She liked to pretend she wasn't who she was. She liked to become someone else whenever she got the chance. Is that a clue? I don't know, you tell me.

But when she turned twenty, that's when the fun really started. That's when she met me. We were a lot alike; maybe that's why I'm having so much trouble describing her. I didn't have much going on in my life and neither did she. We were both looking for something to occupy our idle hands. And they were idle.

Nights blurred together, the days became short and unrecognizable. They were spent sleeping off the previous nights hangover or burnt out from an early morning joint.

She lived in her parent's house still so I let her move in with me. The apartment was far from nice. There were bugs and leaks and strange noises but we barely noticed. There were always other things to think about. Like getting an outfit for that new club. Or getting into the rave on Saturday. Her parents gave her enough money to clothe a third world country every month. They were happy to have her out of their house. Even if she was slowly killing herself somewhere else. They had labeled her a lost cause and she was just fulfilling their prophecy.

She was enrolled in a local community college taking business. Her father decided she needed some sort of diploma even if it was just for him to save face in front of anyone who knew he had a kid. But she never went and he paid the school to keep her on the attendance list in case anyone he knew tried to check it out. But why would they do that? No one cares that much. But he was convinced that someone must.

There wasn't much going on in her life other than waking up to her alarm clock at eight am, deciding not to go to class and then rolling over and making out with whomever happened to be in her bed. She never went to class, she might have thought about it, but she never actually went.

It wasn't really a big surprise when she stumbled out of her bedroom one morning to find me on the couch watching The Simpsons and eating the last bit of peanut butter out of the jar. It wasn't even a surprise when I saw the blood on her Led Zeppelin T-shirt. She was holding the material away from her stomach because it stuck to her like a bathing suit does when you just get out of the water.

"Is there any more peanut butter?" she asked. She stumbled to the kitchen and ran the tap for the rest of The Simpsons. Was I supposed to be doing something? It wasn't really registering that something might possibly be wrong. I let her keep her messed up life in her part of the apartment. I didn't touch her shit. I knew there was a reason. I knew her way too well to go anywhere near her. She never explained herself. That is another thing that she wasn't very good at. And who was I to ask?

She sat down next to me and started to change the channels like I wasn't even there. Her t-shirt was gone. Where? I didn't know or care to know.

"I didn't kill her," she muttered.

"I didn't say anything," I blurted out quickly. I wasn't kidding when I said I never wanted to know. It was never good. She didn't look at me.

"She came at me, it was self defense," she rambled. "It was an accident, a total accident."

"Shut up!" I told her. I was not going to be a part of this. It was none of my business. She could do whatever she wanted with her life. She could kill whomever she liked. I wasn't going to turn her in or even notice. And even if I did her Dad would get her off on some technicality. She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, just like every other junkie and drop out I had ever met. The ones that never had to work for anything are the ones that think they can do whatever they want. Sure, I thought I could too but I was born into this. I was my mother twenty years ago. I never had a chance. It was her that could have been something but she would rather snort it up her nose and flush it down the toilet and pretend she was so tragic. As if she was the one that was doomed from the start. I had a reason to be a fuck up. What was her excuse?

It was starting to come back to me now. Last night I was zoning out on the sofa, high off of some shit I got from the landlord when the phone rang. I picked it up, dropped it once before answering it with something resembling a hello.

"Hello, Misty Dennison please," the woman said without a single drip of expression in her voice. I thought it might be one of those automated survey things that call you when you're right in the middle of something. And I obviously was so I hung up. But the phone rang again.

"Is this Misty Dennison?" the machine on the other end of the line asked.

"Yeah," I gave in. I guess I could do one survey.

"This is Judy Pink from the women's shelter on fifth street. I'm calling about your mother Deirdre," she said. Judy Pink. Pink?

"What did DeDe do this time?" I sighed. They always called me when my mother stumbled into the shelter. I was on their goddamn speed dial. I never went down to the shelter. What did they expect me to do? Care? That wasn't in my genes.

"She overdosed tonight. She's dead," Judy Pink told me. I hung up the phone and watched whatever I was watching.

"I didn't mean to do it. An accident. Yeah… an accident. Or self defense… Yeah self defense," she was muttering to herself again. I was back in the living room holding my empty jar of peanut butter. It was morning again.

"Can you take this into your room?" I told her.

She got up suddenly and headed back to her bedroom.

"Thank you," I grunted.

It was hard to remember what happened after my mother died. All I could think about was my perfect roommate and her perfect life. It made me so mad. She got everything she wanted without ever having to make an ounce of effort. I went to work hung over. I went to work burnt out. I paid my own rent because that was my life. My roommate slept all day and ate all my food. Her mother called her every day to see how her precious little princess was doing. I only heard from my mother when Judy Pink had to inform me over the phone that she was dead.

"They won't believe me Misty. I'm sorry but you were asking for it," she was talking to me again. I turned around. It's not really the kind of thing you are ever prepared to see. Your own body on the floor, eyes staring blankly back at you like there was never anything behind them at all. I dropped the jar of peanut butter but when I looked down to where it must have landed it wasn't there.

My roommate dragged me across the scuffed up hard wood floors in her 100 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. She got those from her Mom as a housewarming gift. My mom came over and threw up in my kitchen sink when I moved in.

She was wrapping me up in her sheets. Dark, sticky blood leaked through and stained the

wood floors. I got up off the couch and went to my roommate. My perfect roommate. I remembered now. My mother died and I suddenly hated my roommate. My perfect roommate that never had a worry in the world. She was right I did come at her. I took a steak knife out of the drawer. The steak knife that my roommate wouldn't let me use because they were for special occasions. She didn't want them to get dull. As if she was going to have a dinner party soon. She was going to set the table and light candles and cook a steak on the brand new George Forman grill that had never even left the box. She was going to do that because she actually thought about someone other than herself once in a blue moon. Too bad I wasn't going to let that happen. I want to tell you that she was a good cook but that's another thing she didn't do. She ate Lunchables. She ate take out. And she never ever offered me any.

She was sleeping all peacefully in her queen-sized bed. I stood at the end of it on my knees and sneered down at her. It was foggy still what happened next. The next thing I knew I was on the couch eating peanut butter. Perfectly fine. My mother was alive. I wasn't angry. Life was good. For the moment. Until I realized it was over.

She had won again. But did I really expect anything less of her? Did I think I could kill her in her sleep? I had come at her, she was right. I was asking for it, she was right. Like always.

She wasn't the dancing type. She didn't like to get dressed up or play with her hair. She wasn't very athletic but she had no problem dragging my body to the garbage shoot and hoisting it up. She had to slam the trap door a couple times on my neck but she got it to close. She wasn't really artistic and she didn't listen to music very much. She liked to do nothing with her time so I guess that is my dilemma in profiling her. She didn't do anything and she didn't like anything. But who am I to judge really? The garbage truck took my body away and no one even noticed I was gone. She was never perfect but she was better than I ever was. I still can't blame her for what she did. She had no choice, it was self-defense. She was one of a kind and even I can't fault her for that.

She scrubbed my blood off the floor and continued to live there. She wasn't the type that was easily spooked. The only thing I could do now was accept that after everything she wasn't, she was still a lot. Accept that she would always beat me. One way or another. I just hope one day someone will care to make a list of what I wasn't.