Kalliope 2015 | Page 34

Pretty in Wings and Red Lipstick by Kyle Tresnan I waited ‘til it was all done to see what I looked like. Marie brought her eyeliner, concealer, foundation, mascara, and lipstick when she came to visit me last summer, and she put them all on my face. “Okay,” she said after she touched up the lipstick (bright red). “Go look!” I’m really struggling to come up with a way to describe what it’s like seeing your face in full makeup for the first time. I hate to use this word because it’s kind of cheap and meaningless, but it really is breathtaking. It’s awesome. It’s more than you could possibly expect. You know when you smile so wide that you have to cover your mouth? It’s one of those things. I looked beautiful. I felt beautiful. Marie and I met in the Fall of 2012. We were sophomores, and both of us were more alone back then than we realized we were. She had been dating the same boy for over three years; I was living with one of my best and oldest friends. But we rushed into friendship like we were pulling ourselves from a fire. We ate together, we read and did homework together, we watched entire TV series together, we talked constantly, we cried in front of each other, we absorbed the parts of each other that we needed, and we got better together. She left a year later. She went to study abroad in France for the first semester of our junior year and ended up staying for the entire year. But this isn’t a sad story: we were good long-distance friends. I woke up automatically at 7 a.m. to answer the messages she’d send me on Facebook from six hours in the future—the distance between Eastern Standard Time and Central European Time. We would Skype when our schedules both allowed it. On a Skype call, I agreed to let her do my makeup. I don’t remember exactly how this happened or what we were 34