Cleaning Rituals I

When I was in college, I went a on a trip to St. Louis with a few other guys, and we shared a hotel room. One afternoon upon emerging from the shower, I found them all sitting on the beds, staring at me angrily.

“Clean?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” I said.

There was a long pause. I stood there drying off. They looked at me like they expected me to say something, but I was clueless.

“When you were growing up,” said another friend, “did you have to share the bathroom with anybody?”

“Nope,” I said. I had my own until I was eighteen.”

He didn’t answer. They all continued to stare at me, but now they were shifting uncomfortably. I realized that I had given an unexpected answer to a rhetorical question.
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