Your Local Nostradamus Part II

          February rolled around, and I got an invitation for my friend Erin’s bowling-themed birthday party in the mail. Of course the only gifts I ever got for friends were cute little Bath and Body Works Art Stuff lotions and shaving creams and soaps that came in these adorable felt purses, so my mom agreed to take me to the Bath and Body Works at Manassas Mall, the one we went to when she wanted to make useless stops at the post office and the bank and the grocery store. She said she had to return a few lotions of Pearberry, and I really wanted her to swap them for Warm Vanilla Sugar, which was pretty much the only adult scent that didn’t make me sneeze like crazy or, ya know, send me into hallucinations thinking that I was seventy year-old in a magnificent garden of something flowery.
     “Pick something nice for Erin,” she said, waving her hand back to the table of Art Stuff and shooting down all my hopes of a new tub of Warm Vanilla Sugar hand-softening scrubbing salt.
     “Okay,” I said, mouthing “Warm Vanilla Sugar” in a very obvious manner.
     She wasn’t paying attention. She was looking at the new bulbs of room fragrances. Apparently they were 20% off, which was obviously a Mega Deal.
     I wandered to the back of the store, stopping a minute to pick through a clear plastic box of half-off back massagers: ones shaped like a bar of soap with wooden spikes coming out one side, others the simple mod-art sculptures with “Bath and Body Works” printed neatly across them in grey TNR.
     I didn’t want to waste my mom’s money on back massagers when I had four at home already, though. So I made my way to the display of Art Stuff at the back. My eyes were a little droopy from lack of sleep (that Johnny Quest kept me up real late, ya know), and I don’t know if I wasn’t thinking all that clearly or what, but for some reason or another, I didn’t notice it until I’d been staring at it a good four or five minutes. Yes there was the Electric Apple roll-on body glitter, yes there was the Goodness Grapeness cosmic cool body lotion, and yes there was the Blazin’ Blueberry shower foam, but something else was cluttering the table. Stacked from top to bottom, about the third scent in from the left, was Charmin’ Cherry glitter lotion, Charmin’ Cherry lipgloss, and Charmin’ Cherry plastic packages of facial cream and acne cleanser, complete with a light pink terrycloth disc for massaging pores.
     You might be thinking: Oh big deal, she just happened to think of one of the most popular fruits that they hadn’t already made a lotion of and just threw it on the table. BIG DEAL. Well shut the fuck up, okay? Obviously it was one small incident, but when “coincidences” compound, they ain’t “coincidences” no more! Ahem…continuing on.
     Summertime. School was on the verge of letting out, and they really didn’t need me anymore in those classrooms, so I was at the mall one lovely Tuesday afternoon, Potomac Mills this time (the one we frequented most often), and my mom had a coupon for a free bottle of some earth-tone shampoo or something.
     Again I was sent to the back of the store, sent to go pour over the same lamo flavors of glitter lotion. (I’d stocked up on the cherry shit back in February, and plus they’d discontinued the citrus, so it wasn’t such an excitement as it used to be.)