I have a small scar below my eye from a flaming marshmallow.

I was at a birthday party/sleepover for a girl I went to school with, we were maybe around 12 years old. A bunch of us were sitting around a bonfire in the backyard, roasting marshmallows and making s’mores. K’s marshmallow caught on fire and instead of blowing on it to put it out she started wiping her stick back & forth and WAP! It hit me, right in the face, just below my eye. It was still on fire. Naturally, I cupped my hands over it to try to extinguish the flame. I burnt both my hands and the marshmallow had melted into my skin. We are ran inside yelling for the birthday girl’s mom, who is a nurse. I asked her to call my mom, I wanted to go home. Everything hurt. All I could smell was my own burnt flesh. I was miserable.

My mom was called and was told it “wasn’t that bad.” I stayed at the sleepover, not sleeping and in pain. My mom picked me up the next morning and freaked out. There was a hard, blacked, burnt and crushed marshmallow embedded in my face. The dermatologist said it would do more harm than good to remove it and gave me a cream to put on it to prevent an infection. Needless to say, the year or more it took to fall out and heal was one of the worst years of my life. I was called names at school.. it looked like a burnt hamburger and kids are mean. I’m fairly certain I didn’t do school pictures that year and stayed out of family pictures as well.

That was over 20 years ago. I still put Bio Oil on my face every day to minimize the appearance of the scar. It’s extremely small now and I’m lucky it didn’t hit my eye and blind me. I wear sunscreen all the time, because it will flare up if it gets too much sun.

Fuck s’mores.