Eloise

She had the red hair that usually skips a generation but could be clearly seen in old pictures of her father sitting shirtless on the hood of his blue Ford Mustang, a can of Miller in one hand and the stub of a half smoked Camel in the other. She had a burst of freckles across her nose, spread out like a constellation.

Her top lip had a small scar, a white worm near the corner of her mouth that would pucker a little when she smiled. When she was five, a boy in the neighborhood hit her in the face with a rock. Jimmy Klein I think, who I heard was up at Cormoran doing five years for aggravated assault.

She got teased for it in middle school, covered it with thick lipstick in high school and eventually embraced it when the teasing died off and she’d kissed enough girls to stop caring.

She’d tell people at parties her father had accidentally cut her when he was trying to pull out a stubborn molar with some dental floss and a doorknob.

Lies were a way for her to stone-step through discomfort. When she was surrounded by people she didn’t know, if stuck in a situation that she couldn’t control, the lies would roll right out of her like a carnival skee-ball machine.

Later, when I was in high school, I’d hear the echoes of those lies whispered down the halls, in between homerooms and in the locker room before a game.

I’d run into those same echoes in the sticky shadows of dirty bars with my lungs half a pack deep and my stomach filled with pitchers of happy-hour beer.

I occaisonally dig down into the messages on my phone, the last conversation we had locked permenant like that white worm of a scar. No lies, just the truth blured from all the medication and medical grade pot. The doctors said had she lived, the scar wrapped all the way around her neck would have put that little worm to shame and dried up every last lie from her lips.