One by one we held the fragrant slips of paper to our faces. When it was my turn I brought it under my nose and swirled it around. With one movement of her brow the woman behind the counter let me know she thought I was an idiot. The paper smelt like junior high. The memory made saliva pool in my mouth as a warning. To hide from my homeroom teacher that I had shared a mickey of vodka with a friend at recess, I’d once put my lips to a highly coveted bottle of Calvin Klein cologne and sprayed. Spinning around in the bathroom stall, trying my best not to vomit, I wished I’d just risked getting a suspension like my friend had and would eventually receive, instead of having my mouth coated with what I now imagine Martin Shkreli’s spunk would taste like.

“What did he say?” One more time I said the exorbitantly priced bottle of Burberry cologne reminded me of junior high and one more time the woman behind the counter looked at me with disgust as she turned back to my friend.

“We do have a smaller bottle, it’s only sixty-dollars, but the bigger bottle is almost double the size and only fifteen-dollars more. You have a man’s more logical brain, so you know this is the better deal.” 

The one of us in our group with a vagina looked surprised at the revelation that all of her actions and decisions up to that point in her life had been made under the watch of an illogical female brain. The woman behind the counter smiled, perhaps unaware due to her apparently crippling lifelong logic deficiency that she’d just thrown her own gender under the bus in an attempt woo a customer.

“What does that mean, you’ll be back?” she yelled after us.

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