“Where Should I Be?” by Emily Anderson

There's a girl sitting beside me that smells like…well.

She smells like waking up in my pink flower bedded sheets at Pop's old house, with the computer in my room that I would fight my sisters over to play the Monsters University event on Club Penguin. With the shelf over the window painted a beach scene with lighthouses, small decorative wooden ships set sailing still on top.

She smells like the light oak wooden storage unit with a T.V. as old as I was where you could hear the static and fuzz more than the show being watched. There was a delay between that T.V. and the one in the sitting room. I would run back and forth between the two to see if I could beat the lag time of the old T.V. I could.

She smells like the creepy clown and circus dolls that Nanna painted that I swore would come alive and eat me at night, so I put a dream catcher with windchimes on one of the cabinet knobs to alert me when they did.

She smells like being piled in the pink bathtub with my sisters after playing all day in the pool, playing with the big mamma frog bath toy that the baby frogs could pile on her back, being washed down with Barbie bubble bath.

She smells like pancakes with chocolate chips and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter butter for breakfast in the fish themed kitchen with blue countertops and puffy teal seated chairs that would let out a deflating hush as you sat on them and left painful pressure marks on the back of your thighs when you got up.

She smells like Peter Pan peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread by the pool, the sound and feeling of the hissing of wet feet coming out of the pool meeting hot bricks with little mossy plants growing in the cracks felt like your feet were sizzling.

She smells like going to Toys R Us after you made your younger sister say pretty please to Granny Mare, coming home with bags of Barbies, Disney Princesses, and Monster High dolls because she would tell you no, but never your sisters.

She smells like the only two kids movies Pops had for you and your sisters to watch, Madagascar and Monsters Inc. You didn't like either movie, because you didn't get them, but Pops would howl with laughter in his big pappa bear recliner chair before he fell asleep halfway through.

She smells like Krispy Kreme donuts magically appearing on the kitchen counter for breakfast before Pops left for work.

She smells like playing Where’s My Water on my iPod touch on the single couch angled in a way where you couldn't see the T.V. and playing Minion Run on the pink toilet, the app crashing two times before it allowed you to play.

She smells like loud, scary summer storms that would boom across the ocean, lighting up the sky white and purple and sending down showers of rain that made you think a tornado would rip everything apart.

She smells like going to the water park, hiding under the water when the military jets would fly over so you couldn't hear them, but you could feel the vibrations deep in your chest when they sonic boomed.

She smells like summer.

She smells like fun.

Like childhood.

Pop’s old house.

She smells like I’m little again, going to his house for weeks at a time in the summer, my only worry being when we were going to get toys and counting to one hundred and twenty after being sprayed with sunscreen before jumping in the pool.

I should have been there this summer, like I am every summer. But I’m states away in Kentucky, sitting in a classroom learning about publishing.

I should have been in Virginia.

I should have been ten again using up all the printer paper to make things for my dolls.

I should have been there.

But I’m here, sitting in a classroom next to a girl that smells like what my life used to be and knowing that I can never go back.

Emily Anderson is an MFA student at Eastern Kentucky University who likes all things magical and nostalgic. Emily writes in both fiction and creative nonfiction with an interest in flash to capture big thoughts and feelings in small spaces.