I have always hated the smell of potpourri.

My family moved when I was five years old, since the school system near our first house was dreadful. I hadn't yet started kindergarten, since I was born three days after the September 1 cut-off. At the time, I was very into ballet and dance and reading, but I don't remember having any friends. I wasn't sad about leaving anyone behind, but I was terrified of the objects I would be parting with. I didn't want the house itself to feel abandoned or unloved.

We went back to visit the house shortly after settling in to our new home, and the lady who had bought the old place was kind enough to invite us inside to show us what she had done with it. I was bravely trying to fight back a veritable ocean of tears, silently sending apologies to every dust bunny and light fixture and even the creaks in the floor for leaving them behind on such short notice. The woman must have seen my quivering lip; she gave me a pair of ballet slippers stuffed with potpourri as a parting gift. I took them greedily and was somehow assured that the house was in good hands. But even then, I hated the smell of the potpourri.

I still have those ballet slippers, tucked away in a box with my baby books and other various paraphernalia from my early childhood. It wasn't until just now, however, that I realized that perhaps the slippers might be the reason why I so intensely dislike that particular odor. Or maybe it really is that terrible.

The boy who sits next to me in my microeconomics class is cute in an innocent sort of way. He is sometimes easily embarrassed, but he manages to make that a charming attribute. I'm not currently "on the prowl" for a boyfriend or even a crush, but there is so little to look forward to in the class that I am sometimes overly excited by his very existence.

Today, he approached my desk before class to compare his homework with mine. The vain part of me assumed that word had gotten around that I was one of the elite few actually floating by with an A in the class, possibly the only one to have gotten an A on the first test. (I even managed to weasel a higher grade out of my teacher, who had deducted a point without reason on one of the short-answer questions on the exam.)

A different vain part of me ditched this theory and assumed that perhaps he was merely using the homework assignment as an icebreaker. Who could resist a girl in a sweatshirt and plaid pink shorts who hadn't even bothered brushing her hair before letting it air-dry in the wind on the way to school?

But then reality kicked in, and I blushed, accidentally bit the inside of my cheek, and forgot how to talk.

I would like to collect shredded pieces of credit cards in the wild hopes of re-uniting them with their kin. I have no desire to use the cards, mostly because I'm content with what I have but also because running from the law takes way too much effort. I just want to have a room in my house that is dedicated to color-coding little shards of plastic, all of which would be meticulously tagged and logged on a spreadsheet somewhere. That kind of organization excites me, but it also makes me wonder if I barely escaped being labeled as autistic.