Forget Magazine. Remember, Remember, Remember.

I was seventeen that summer.

She came to a party at a friend’s house and we all talked in whispers about her. She had brown hair, green eyes and a face that warmed when it called you stupid. She shared a kitchen table chair with me as I played drinking games with a straight Coke. She took me outside and talked to me in her broken English and smoked Belvederes. I translated drunken people talking high school French to her and a friend told me that it was on.

We played mini golf a couple days later and she was mine by the eighteenth hole. I told her about my life and taught her about shotgun and Nanaimo car rituals. She told me little and taught me about seventeen-year-old girls. I took her to work and my boss stared at her. He told me later, “You just want to blow it when they talk that French to you, don’t you?” She didn’t talk much French to me, but admired the way I said, “Crème sucre.” She liked the sound of the word “idiot.” I made her laugh.

She’s the reason I believe all French girls are named Sophie. They all like Peanut Butter and taste like American cigarettes. They all have boyfriends named Sliver, but pronounce them slee-vay.

“Like this,” she said, as the fingers on her left hand picked his name from her right. She told me she wouldn't miss me, because of Sliver, and not to eat my lips.

I loaned her an itchy grey sweater that she took with her. It fit her better anyway. I wrote her twice. The first was about nothing. The second was about the World Cup and how I sat by the television looking for her face in the throngs of people wedged into downtown Paris. I saw her at least a million times. She never wrote back. Since then I've been strong.

Craig Battle knows rampant truth. Rip your fucking face off.