I've Never Told a Lie and that Makes Me a Liar 

The amount of attention Ava paid to little details always fascinated me. It was like she never saw the big picture, but that was okay, because all the little ones were so much better anyway.

She was the first one to tell me my smile was crooked. Ava would tease me about it and that was okay. When she did it, she did it to make me feel better about what happened. When other people teased me about it, they wanted to know who had broken the jaw of a five-year-old—they never noticed it until they realized there was good gossip in the mix.

But she noticed things about people they never knew about themselves. It was her way of complimenting them, telling them about their weird quirks. They were the things she liked best, and knowing Ava liked something that most people would have been insecure about was a gift.

One of her brother's front teeth stuck out slightly farther than the other and she thought it made him look like a squirrel. Her dad's right forearm had a silver scar not even an inch long laying over the indention from his bones that looked like a tiny river. My dad had a bend in his collar bones that most people recognized as a healed break, but Ava saw as a mountain range, meeting at a pond in the hollow of his throat.

She cared so much about them all and it seemed she had every detail of them memorized. Just the way she looked at them with so much affection was like watching a masterpiece being painted in the reflection of her gaze.

Sadly, it was all because of the hours she spent in that room, staring at the blue diamonds on the wallpaper, counting the screws in the light fixture, examining the sheets and the paint on the door. Concentrating on the insignificant parts of her afternoon kept her alive.

And it was that attention to detail that made her incredibly talented. After her aunt's husband nearly broke her nose, Ava had to find other ways to displace her anger and sadness. So, she simply turned it off. She focused on all the little things no one else saw or cared about.

Over Christmas that year our elementary school art teacher gave us a large piece of paper and an assignment to bring back a drawing. Ava worked hour after hour on hers. She'd get up early and stay up late—avoiding sleep and all the things that worried her. Instead, she focused on lines, shadows, and shapes, letting all the little parts of the image consume her until she could break herself apart and scatter it across the picture.

The scared little girl that spent too much time with her aunt's husband could be broken off and stuck in a colored pencil. The angry girl that wanted to answer everything with teeth and knuckles was snapped in two and used to smear the pencil led into a gradient of shadow and light. The smart girl was woven into the paper, paying careful attention to proportion and depth. The sad girl was the eraser she used tirelessly, blocking in and undoing everything that made her insecure.

And she did it all in secret. No one knew Ava spent hours in her room concocting one of the most beautiful pieces of art they would ever see. Fear of disapproval and rejection kept her from being proud of it. She said she was going to play. Alone. In her room. Like she always did.

I was the first one she showed it to, two days before we had to go back to school, and that was an honor. I knew she was obsessing over it and I knew no one else had had the privilege of seeing the piece only the clock had watched her create.

Nervously, she unrolled it across her bedroom floor, refusing to look at my face until she knew I wasn't looking at her. There weren't words for what I saw. Saying that it was great or that she had done a good job was an understatement, so we sat in silence as I tried desperately to find something powerful enough.

She'd drawn a forest caught in the majesty of the first days of autumn. Their leaves were beaming with browns, yellows, and oranges that she'd she combined in the most intricate shading. Some were even tinged with hints of green where they seemed to be hanging on to their last bits of life in a dying glory. I could have stared at them for hours and never been able to see all the details she'd included, but there was so much more.

The bottom of the paper she'd colored with a blue, gray, and white mixture creating the most beautiful river tearing across the page, the trees reflected shakily in its rippling movement. Afraid of smearing the magic, I ran my fingers over it carefully, fully expecting them to be drenched when I pulled them back. A large gray and black rock jutted out of the middle, disturbing the trickling and distorting the reflections and I checked my finger for blood, sure that its jagged realism had cut me.

It looked so real. Had I not known this was the same sheet of paper our art teacher had given her two weeks before I would have sworn it was a photograph. Surely she had gotten a camera, snapped the shot, and somehow put it on the once blank canvas, because it didn't feel like anything was stopping me from walking right into the image. It was that real.

"You like it?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. Quickly she pointed to a few stray shapes on the page and added "It's not done."

I told her it was amazing. It was better than amazing. And she smiled. She smiled so big it must have hurt her cheeks. The creases under her eyes that had been left when her aunt's husband had introduced her nose to the edge of the bathtub—the ones that always made gray eyes look so tired—turned up in little smiles of their own.

"'S okay, I guess," she said, trying to fold the picture up. I caught her hand and forced her long fingers to smooth it out again.

It wasn't okay. It was as close to perfect as anything I'd ever seen and I made sure she knew that was how I felt. For once in her life she got praise she felt she truly deserved and it almost made her cry. She was so happy.

But when I insisted she show it to her parents, she objected. Although she didn't tell me then, that was the time when her aunt's husband started warning her that if she told about their little secrets, her parents wouldn't love her anymore. She'd started living in fear of disappointing them and had pushed herself to the point of completely giving up on telling or showing them anything. They couldn't be upset if they knew absolutely nothing about her life.

It was easier to convince Ava to show her brother. No one said he wouldn't love her and they'd always been close. Really, really close. So close that she didn't drag him into the mess with her aunt's husband. She knew him well enough to know he couldn't handle that.

He was at a loss for words too and in awe we sat in her room and watched as she finished the picture, moving her pencil swiftly to create a wooden swing hanging from a tree branch.

The ropes keeping it suspended were overrun with ivy that looked like it was going to jump out of the page and crawl up your arm. When she picked up the purple coloring pencil I almost objected, afraid she was going to ruin the image with the odd choice. Plants weren't supposed to be purple. But she wove it in so perfectly with the dark green and black, making shadows underneath so that the leaves sprang up from the page.

As though it were a normal thing for a six-year-old to notice, she colored a knot in the wooden seat. An imperfect piece of wood to build a perfect swing. Of course Ava made beauty out of the ugly little things no one else noticed. That's what the whitespace does.

It was amazing to watch her work. To see how happy it made her to worry about nothing but the most seemingly insignificant details that made the picture so real. To know that two of the people she cared most about saw everything she was without seeing her at all. Her blonde waves fell in her face and she pulled them back constantly, removing the haze she lived in so she could see the real picture. Her gray eyes were fixated on the magic bringing the drawing to life. It was a work of art within a masterpiece.

She didn't stop smiling until her parents, knowing that silence where three young children were supposed to be playing was generally a warning sign, came into her room and saw her work before she had time to hide it.

At first they didn't believe she could have done something so beautiful. It wasn't expected for an art graduate, much less a six-year-old, to have paid such painstaking attention to detail. Ava looked ashamed as her parents looked skeptically at it, wondering if their daughter had traced another picture and was going to turn it in as her own work.

But her brother and I wouldn't let them think that. We jumped to our feet and insisted without relent that we'd just watched her do it. We'd seen her make the swing come to life with our own eyes. She used weird colors and we always thought she was messing up until she'd pull back and you'd see the whole picture. You'd see how insignificant that one, odd color seemed, but how it made the whole picture jump into reality without hesitation.

And with that attitude we exposed everyone to Ava's intricate talents. Her parents. Our teachers. Our art teachers. Our friends. Our families. We wanted everyone to know just what an amazing job Ava had done. Because it made us feel good. It made her feel good.

She deserved every bit of attention that was thrown her way because of the picture. They wanted her to enter it in a competition. They hung it in the window of the front office for the entire school to see. They asked her to draw other things for them and she didn't fail to deliver exactly what was requested.

Everyone was genuinely proud of the little artist. She'd poured hours and hours into the masterpiece, raising a callous on her fingers where she held her pencil at odd angles. All that work because she only saw the little things. She only saw the seventeen diamonds and the three screws.

Until she started getting praise, I never realized just how animated Ava had been. All her actions and reactions were calculated with the formula I gave her: be as vague and as passive as possible. Suddenly, when people started realizing just how special she was, she became important. People stopped focusing on the bad stuff and started focusing on her.

It was like we were colored pencils and every shade brought her to life with more and more clarity until the little girl was the focal point of a good impression.

She learned humbleness from her father and me. Shyly she'd thank people for their compliments and change the subject, but her sureness was growing. There was no way to stop it. Every kind word she received made her feel better about herself. And she hadn't been happy with herself since she was too little to really know what happy meant.

People were seeing her and not just the little blonde headed, gray eyed coach's daughter. They were seeing Ava and the girl that had always faked confidence was starting to realize just what the word meant.

But her aunt's husband had a reputation to uphold and ultimately Ava's downfall came when she tried to rise up.

Not even a month after the hype around her unusually grand talent started he had to punish her again.

She got too confident. She started challenging him and he didn't like it.

So he took her outside, grabbed the shovel he used for work, and hit her in the face.

All I can say is that she was damn lucky he hesitated. Had he not, he would have killed her.

Instead, the edge landed perfectly against the right side of her jaw, splitting the skin open in a perfect seam and cracking the bones underneath. A quicker swing would have placed it on her forehead and a quicker jump from Ava would have place that cut across her throat.

She was damn lucky.

And her parents were pissed. All because they thought she was clumsy.

It wasn't a fair fight. Ava's brother never needed anything but glasses. Ava had the misfortune of needing a lot more that she didn't ask for.

It wasn't her fault she had a condition that put her in hypothermic states too often. It wasn't her fault she sometimes got ear infections and migraines that were so bad she couldn't just sleep them off. It wasn't her fault her face had been slammed against a bathtub. And it wasn't her fault her aunt's husband had tried to kill her.

But they didn't know that. It didn't make sense to me how upset it made her to see her parents get slightly annoyed by major inconveniences like antibiotics and stitches. Her parents were nothing like mine. They continually told her it wasn't her fault; she just needed to be more careful. It wasn't her fault she just needed to tell them sooner when she hurt or when she was cold. She shouldn't be upset; she should just be a little more conscious of herself.

And it wasn't fair to blame her parents for Ava's fears. Everything was handled kindly, with the love of a family.

They didn't know she was terrified of disappointing them. They didn't know that their lectures—meant for nothing but reference and given out of sincere love—were making her scared. Those lectures made Ava think her aunt's husband was right. If they were annoyed by things out of her control how would they feel when they realized that she'd done nothing to stop her aunt's husband?

How could they still love her after that?

For a while, when people told her how amazing her picture was, Ava thought maybe they would still care about her. Maybe they would understand she'd just been afraid.

But thinking like that was what got a shovel slammed into her jaw.

When it happened everyone immediately knew. There had been so much publicity directed at her and giant black stitches taking up temporary residence on her jaw didn't go unnoticed. The scar it left on her face was the meanest punishment anyone could ever imagine. It made her part her hair to the right, and keep her hand always near her face to cover it as much as possible. Perhaps it wouldn't have been bad if she hadn't begged me to help her take the stitches out way too early and if I hadn't agreed.

As soon as her parents told her she could wear makeup she never took it off. She mastered the art of covering the silver blemish in a matter of days. She didn't have a choice. All anyone looked at when they talked to her was that stupid scar. Every day she had to see it and think of what that man did to her. When she could, she slept in makeup, because she didn't want to wake up and see it. More than anything she wanted to forget.

But getting there wasn't easy.

The day she came back to school our teacher asked what had happened and Ava gave the same answer that had come to be expected of her: "it was an accident."

But this time our teacher didn't let it go. She said it looked really bad. She wanted to know what kind of accident? What had happened? It didn't look like a simple slip and fall. The cut was too clean, so what had really happened?

They were the same questions the ER nurses had asked. It was the same question the doctor sewing her face up wanted answered. That question was asked to her relentlessly by her parents and her brother and it was the same answer: "It was an accident. I fell."

But they had seen Ava. Suddenly everyone knew her. They knew she was lying even if they couldn't prove it. Had they worked a little harder, she would have come clean, but no one had pushed until our Kindergarten teacher.

The woman cared about Ava, but she wasn't going to be happy without the truth—even if it meant striping away every ounce of confidence the little girl had once had as she was questioned in the middle of class. Ceaselessly, she shoved Ava toward the real story. She wanted the one as real as Ava's drawing. What happened? What happened? What happened?

Like a fucking parrot that could only be bothered to learn one phrase: what happened, what happened?

All the kids in the class were staring at Ava, whispering about the ugly black stitches on her jaw. They all sat still watching as she squirmed in her seat under their gazes.

Ava made the worst mistake possible when her back was against the wall: she panicked. As soon as she thought up a new lie to counter the questions she'd say it without thinking. Soon there were so many they were jumping out and grabbing her like the ivy. She was nothing more than the little knot in the swing, tripping over each shadow in her mad desperation.

It made her feel stupid to make so many mistakes and I could see it in the way her gray eyes grew cloudy. The teacher threw out every lie until there was no place to hide.

Feeling all the pressure on her shoulders start sliding closer and closer to the floor of her circus tent, Ava started to cry. She must have been in immense pain physically and mentally. No six-year-old should have had to face that.

With a pleading look in her watering gray eyes, she glanced at me, begging for a lie that would work, before putting her head down and sobbing on her desk. As the teacher placed a large, soft hand on her back, rubbing the blonde waves and whispering softly that everything was okay, the rest of the kids in our class giggled nervously.

The teacher asked her again, her voice loud and firm like it was Ava's last chance, to tell the truth. And in that moment I knew I had to do something.

So I stood up and, feigning as much panic as I could, insisted that I had done it.

I told them I'd hit her in the face with a shovel. We were playing and it was an accident. She just didn't want to get me in trouble.

And when I said it Ava started crying for a different reason: I was going to be in so much trouble.

I didn't care. It wasn't right to let her be bullied into feeling stupid. It wasn't right that she had to be so sorry about all the lies she told, because they were the ones forcing them out of her.

I didn't care what happened to me as long as she was okay. She just needed a moment to catch her breath and I was going to give her all the time in the world. Her picture hadn't been drawn in a day.

A few days later, after the kids in our class still hadn't shut up about the horribly ugly stitches on her face, she drug me to the front office at the end of the day. We were supposed to be meeting her brother and catching a bus over to her dad's office, but she had something else planned. She said it would only take a minute.

She was right. Having me distract the principal and the secretary with a story about how sorry I was for lying about what happened to Ava—which ultimately earned me a ticket to rejoin the class a few days early—while she pulled her picture down and shoved it in her backpack, didn't take long at all.

On the bus, she pulled out the freshly wrinkled lump of paper that had once been flawless and ripped it in half. I asked what she was doing and with ice in her voice she said: "I don't like it. The colors were weird."

And we didn't talk about it anymore.

Instead, I asked her why he hit her in the face. All I knew was the shovel story, but I didn't know why he decided then. Why that day?

For a moment she considered the answer, wondering if she should take the truth or grab a card from up her sleeve and lay it on the table. Her gray eyes were distant as her long fingers balled the two halves of the paper into a crumpled mess. Nervously, she smoothed her hair over her shoulders and around her face, making sure it hid as much of the scar as possible. It was a habit she wouldn't be able to shake for the rest of her life.

She looked almost lovely as she contemplated her options. Almost like she was judging just how much she cared.

Then she simply looked at me mischievously and said "I bit him."

She flashed me her teeth, winced in pain, and joined me in a light giggle. It wasn't funny that she'd been hurt, it was funny that he got what was coming to him. The confidence she'd been building up had boiled down to that one moment and as bad as her face hurt she couldn't be sorry about it.

But she refused to let anyone give her confidence anymore.

The school was horrified to find her drawing missing and blamed some unknown bandit for being jealous of her artwork. They tried everything to make it up to her, but she politely declined. There was nothing to make up. They could start ignoring her again and she would be fine. She was the white space.

When the art teacher made another commotion about Ava's next piece—a still life of flowers in a vase that looked like a photograph out of a gardening magazine—and went to hang it on the wall, Ava got scared.

"Please don't," she said, her cheeks turning red with embarrassment. "I just wanna take it home."

They let her and she shoved it in a box where the rest of her art would go for the next ten years.

Until he came around—that boy she'd been so head over heels for. The one who was so bad to her and yet she took him back.

She showed him her artwork.

He thought it was amazing. He thought that was the only thing that kept her from being perfectly normal and that made him perfect for her.

See, he didn't move to town until after the scandal with Ava's family had come and gone. It was all swept up in a tidy little pile under the rug that he knew nothing about.

It made him perfect. He knew nothing about her at all. They met in high school choir and all he knew was that she had blonde hair and gray eyes. Yet, that was enough for him to want to get to know her. He learned about everything she wanted him to know straight from her own mouth.

Finally someone was hearing her story like she wanted it told. It wasn't what they had seen or the gossip they'd picked up on the streets. It was the truth as she saw it—with all the unhappy parts omitted.

That's why she fell so hard for him.

Because he didn't know anything about what had happened back then.