P is for

Pink * Pomegranate

Everything in my room had smelled like pomegranates ever since my roommate had spilled that bottle of bath oil. At first it burned my sensitive nose and Julie looked ashamed every time I sneezed. But then I just sort of stopped noticing unless I left the room and Julie stopped caring that I sneezed every time I came back.

And even though the smell bothered me something awful, I didn't think it bothered anyone else until two days after the great spill, when I left my door open as I watched a movie. The engineering boy from down the hall came to stare with a red nose. "What in god's name is that smell?" he asked.

"Pomegranate."

I was hardly apologetic, and I was hardly welcoming. But he still sat down in Julie's desk chair and said, "Oh, that's okay."

It didn't occur to me until much, much later that he may have been somewhat sarcastic.

But anyway, I didn't much know what to say to that, so I just kept watching my movie. The engineering boy from down the hall, who had mistakenly been put on a floor with all the humanities kids, settled in to join me with nothing in the way of invitation. Some sixteen weeks later he told me he'd just wanted to talk to me, since I seemed like the only kid on the floor who wasn't some hippy artist.

I studied art. English, too, but I studied art.

Delicate irony.

But the whole point of the story, the part that still makes me chuckle, is that after the movie, and after I had two classes, after dinner, when I saw that poor engineering boy that night, on the fourth floor of the library--

he smelled like pomegranates.