Skinned

When I watch the girl sitting across from me in the airport café sink her thumb through the belly of an orange, the first thing I think of is the apartment I shared with you during our sophomore year of college. We shared the bedroom on the right side of the hallway. Our room was split down the middle— a twin bed snuggled against either wall. My side of the room was loud with reds and pinks. A cheap tapestry, one that was likely slapped with a counterfeit pattern and hurriedly huffed out of a despicable factory somewhere hung over my window blocking out all the light. You taped up a clutter of papers on your side: a poster of a famous French cat, photographs of Obama smiling at children, poems clipped from the campus literary magazine.

The girl in the airport grips the bottom of the orange and wedges her other thumb into the hole. She splits it open. The smell is immediate.

I think of a morning in the peak of winter, I can’t remember if it was before or after the holidays. We were getting dressed in our separate corners of the room. It’s funny, even though we did it every morning and every night, I don’t remember ever seeing you fully naked. Yes, I can remember the shape of your body hunched topless over a pair of skinny jeans. I can recall the slippage of a stubborn bra strap down your arm. I helped you detangle your earring from a sweater snaggle at least a dozen times. But I never saw all of you. I remember one time letting my breasts out in front of you and asking you to be honest, if you thought my nipples were weird. You stared at them for a moment, like you were trying to quickly read directions posted on a sign. Then you looked up at me and replied to my question. I forget what you said.

I was lotioning my legs that morning and I saw the bottle of orange essential oil sitting on the lip of the dresser. I remembered reading online somewhere that the smell of orange can help boost one’s serotonin levels. I told you this as I shook a drop of the stuff onto my wrist. I remember your eyes on me as you turned away from your reflection in the mirror. You used to do this thing with your eyes so often you probably don’t even know that you did it. Sometimes, you did it over something that I found relatively underwhelming like trying a new flavor of cold brew at the café on the bottom floor of the library. Sometimes you did it when I read you my thesis statement for the essay I was writing. Once, it happened when you heard that thing our roommate said to me under her breath while scrubbing the pan I had already washed. With her hands plunged in the sink, suds spraying off the mouth of the pan, she said something to me that made your eyes grow wide— so wide they swallowed up your face.

I remember that when you yelled at her, she threw the pan back into the water and let it sink. She slammed the door to her room on the left side of the hallway. You ended up being the one to rewash my pan. Even as you scrubbed though, it took awhile for your eyes to shrink back down to normal.

It’s because of the way she said the word “useless”, you told me afterwards.

People like that grew up with parents that had no boundaries, you said, proud of yourself for understanding this. 

We only had a few minutes before our English lecture started across campus.

You took the oil from me and dabbed it twice against each wrist in big, heaping, fragrant droplets. I had to remind you that a little goes a long way.

You only need a dash, I said.

As soon as I said it, I saw your face shutter up in shame. It was instinct— like a pupil disappearing when thrust under sudden light.

It smells so good, I said, instead of saying sorry.

We rubbed our wrists together like kindlings groping for a spark. I pressed my arm into my jugular and watching me, you did the same. Pressing skin into skin, trying to transfer as much smell as possible onto the seldom bits of us that were exposed.

I can feel it working already, you said.

My tongue curdled. Even though I had suggested the oil, even though I had used it, invented it right there in the empty space between us, I was so angry that you took it’s powers to heart. And so envious. Why did you get to believe in this stupid, psydo-medicinal hoax? What made you so lucky, so weightless in the world as to believe in my flimsy report?

We curled our heads into our chests like pigeons against the wind on our walk to class. It’s hard to chat in weather like that. Cold that’s that cold ceases to be felt as temperature and instead begins to be experienced as a physical interaction with the body— a sting, a smother. But at least it was still morning. The winters in Wisconsin are even darker than they are cold. In about four hours, the brightness would be melted to blue. And then that blue would be swallowed up in black, like a mold-ravaged bread end.

We finally reached the lecture hall. Your cheeks fogged up with red as the first taste of warm. We knew we were being too loud in our boots as we shuffled into two middle seats, trying not to graze the edges of other student’s notebooks with our cumbersome, coat-swaddled bodies. By the time we sat down, the professor was already talking. Mercifully, she was ignoring us. You hated it when we were late. But I could tell that you didn’t want to get upset with me because it would spoil the orange. I didn’t want to say sorry for the same reason.

Halfway through her breathless lecture on “Daddy”, I brought my wrist to my nose, subtly, like I was just creatively scratching my face.

The orange was gone.

You glanced over at the last second, just when I was about to pull my hand away. So I closed my eyes instead, the way one might when basking in the sun. I kept my wrist pressed to my nose. I smiled a smile with no bite.

So good, I mouthed to you without really looking at you.

You smiled with teeth and looked down.

The professor did not notice our disinterest in her lecture. The students didn’t either. But I wondered if anyone could smell us. I wondered if the orange particles on my skin had extracted themselves from me and drifted through the air, eager to find a more deserving host. I looked around at the amphitheatre of hunched heads, wondering who had been chosen to smell like oranges instead of us.

Or it’s possible that our noses had just grown accustomed to the smell so quickly, it was as if there weren’t anything on us at all. Only our bodies remembered it, but to our senses it was lost. Or perhaps our brains, ravenous from the cold, had gobbled up all that orange without chewing. Inside our heads, the smell sat like a lump in the stomach. Our brains were bloated with the feast of this welcome interruption to the senses, and now we could get sick, even from just the smell.

I never meant to remember this morning with you. There were so many other moments that I set out to remember and promptly forgot. I assume all those moments are still somewhere inside of my body, lazily bumping against each other like deflating balloons. But they are invisible to me now as I sit here, blinking in the fluorescent light of an airport café.

I never meant to make you feel like you were taking up too much orange for yourself, like you couldn’t have whatever I had. I didn’t mean to make us late. I didn’t mean to swallow up the smell, lose it, and then lie about it.

When I look up, the girl in the airport is gone. She left the orange peel on the table, belly up, empty.

Kate Nerone is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She currently attends the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she is earning a degree in creative writing.