She, with dirty blonde hair, painted a bloody swath across all of the Kingdom of Spain; a trail of broken hearts from Barcelona to Madrid into the Portuguese Republic and back. Bands of American girls with long, tight, shirts for dresses and striped leggings come through and dance and drink every year, but she was different. She was the kind of girl about whom people say, 'she's the kind of girl who knows exactly what she wants' and gets it. That kind of girl. The kind of girl people love and hate that they love her. Even the people who say aloud they hate her, they love her, she's that kind of girl. And this particular girl was named, Elle Finney. And, of course, she was hated, and thus loved. Spain hadn't been rocked like this since Republicanos and Nacionales spilled each other's blood.
Elle Finney was around 5'6" with a medium frame, voluptuous to a point, endowed but not overdone. Her hair was long and straight, usually parted on one side, that hair pulled across her brow.The green eyes of a doe outlined in black. A straight, just so slightly upturned, nose gave off approachability and royal elegance. She had one tooth that was just the tiniest bit crooked proving that she was perfect. If any human was to be human and still be perfect, one of their teeth would have to be just the tiniest bit crooked.
Elle's family had found it’s way into money only a few years earlier; her parents decided, that with a fair portion of their new wealth, they would educate and culture their daughter. They had each grown up wealthy and had both rejected their families after similar education and culturing, they decided for their daughter to do the same.
So she was here now, dancing with Spaniards, had been for almost six months. Her time was running out. She had certainly made her mark, but was getting frantic in the final hours. Before Spain she'd gone to school on the West coast for a year, then back to the East coast for a semester and now here. As for after this, she didn't know.
Her time being short, she did what any decent American girl would do in a foreign country: She snorted a lot more blow. She went down on a boy or two or three in nightclub bathrooms. She had a few girls down on her in her room, her host family steps away. She started fights with the rich Franco-Fascist bitches at her school, and, lastly, fell in love. That love lasted her final month in Spain. It tempered her, calmed her. This is not a love story though. She went back to the states. She never talked to her Spanish lover again.
The boy she'd been somewhat seeing at Northeastern, before she went abroad, sent her a message the day after she got back. He was tall and classically handsome, he studied music and was always interesting; she had been head over heels for him, she cried for three days straight when the Kingdom of Spain first welcomed her. Elle told herself she'd call him when her jet lag was a little better. But this is not a love story. Elle never got around to calling.
Still, Elle would probably marry a musician with thick glasses one day, the hip and dorky kind, not the other kind of musician with the other kind of glasses. She was the kind that wore big headphones and sometimes wondered if she was trying too hard to look too cool, then she’d look in the mirror and realize: too cool is only just cool enough. Maybe that's why she'd marry a musician, if she really loved him, to listen to his music in big headphones. Elle Finney in a white dress, waiting to kiss at the altar. Elle Finney enraptured. Wait. This is not a love story though, that must be repeated; in fact, this is actually a story about rape and poison. It's a murder mystery. Something like that. Elle has nothing to do with this story. It probably goes something like:
Someone was walking, maybe down an empty street or through a forest at dusk, and she heard something behind her so she tried to turn around, but it was (of course) too late, and she was repeatedly penetrated, then stabbed; long story short: I did it. All because of a broken highball glass. How's that for irony?
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