My youngest sister, McCayla, is finally coming back from California today-she’s been gone for over six weeks and has been anxious to go home. She’s been calling me quite a bit to tell me about her time there, and every time I talk to her I can’t help but remember all the things that happened when she was a little kid. Sadly, she doesn’t remember most of them, but at least this gives me an excuse to tell her all about them.

One of the incidents I was thinking about a while ago was shortly after my other sister Violet had been given a lipgloss kit. Violet was always really into experimenting, and had made a green lipgloss and thrown it in a bowl on top of her dresser.

As was typical for a Saturday, my parents went for a ride on their Harley and we were all home alone. I had thought that McCayla was just sitting in her room being the strange little kid that she was when Violet came downstairs and says “McCayla is really scared and doesn’t want you to get mad. She won’t come downstairs unless you promise you won’t get mad.”

“Oh, fucking hell. (If I said a sentence without the fuck word in it when I was a teenager, I have no idea what it was) Ok, I promise, I won’t get mad, but I hate it when you do this. Now, where’s McCayla?”

McCayla comes walking down the stairs very slowly with her hands in front of her face crying and repeating “promiseyouwon’tgetmadPROMISEYOUWON’TGETMAD!”

I brace myself for the worst, expecting who knows what. When her hands were free I fell forward grabbing the handrail on the stairs laughing until my stomach hurt.

McCayla, still bawling, attempted to tell me what had happened. “I was playing Indian.” Her face was covered in green patterns resembling tribal markings. Apparently, she’d found Violet’s lipgloss.

“It’s Native American now, kid. Oh…fuck. Ok, give me a minute to think, let’s go to the bathroom.”

I scrubbed her face while she bawled and it wasn’t coming off at all. No fading-nothing. I said I thought we were going to need to call someone and she FREAKED OUT. McCayla grabbed my legs and started screaming “Do not call Mom and Dad!”

I was trying everything we had in the bathroom. Being a teenager, it occurred to me that when I washed my face with hot water and put globs of Eucerin cream on my face it would clear up-so I gave it a go on McCayla’s green face-and for some reason I’ve never figured out it worked! Makes me really wonder about Eucerin cream.

I desperately wish I had pictures of McCayla’s green face to show people, I still see it quite clearly in my mind, haha…