"Ne, Takashi." I look down at my Chiharu-chan lying on her stomach, chin in both hands, from my sitting position on our picnic blanket. Her pigtails, braided today, faithfully bounce next to her, just as they have all these years I've known and loved her. Before I have a chance to answer, she impatiently prods me. "What's bothering you?"

I smile down at her. "Did you know that Why Bother? was a series of 10 minute conversations aired in Britain? One of the conversations was titled Eels, Love and Guns."

She tilts her head up in my direction and gives me her very best exasperated smile. "I see you took my suggestion to search for strange true facts to heart." She pauses. "At least partially. But seriously." Her expression is concerned once more.

I grin down her, this pigtail-wearing girl whom I've never been able to fool. "You were right. It is more fun this way. Not only have I expanded my domain of creativity, people will never be able to know if I'm telling lies or the partial truth. Well, except you."

She laughs and I'm suddenly reminded of our first meeting.

I discovered at an early age that lying, like many things, is an art form. The best liars are the ones you will never truly get to know. Look at what lies beneath the lies. (This proverb comes from the sayings of a wise elder named Dancing Rain of the Black Hawk tribe as the Europeans invaded America. Really.)

I also discovered at an early age that I had the rare talent of being able to use my creativity to make anything interesting. Shortly thereafter, I began practicing my craft. By the time I started kindergarten, I could draw crowds by telling the stories that almost always resulted from a random tangent of somebody's comment. Granted, some people figured out the lies sometimes, but nobody was accurate enough to distinguish all the time which was which, until the first day of kindergarten.

It was recess and I was on the swings, jabbering away about the origins of jacks, when a girl in brown pigtails bound in blue ribbons stepped right in front of my swing. She had her hands on her hips and a disapproving look in her brown eyes. As the swing carried me up and down in increasingly longer arcs, the girl swung in and out of my vision.

"You shouldn't go around telling lies." I was so surprised I stopped pushing the swing higher for a moment. What I was telling was one of my masterpieces. No one so far had figured out that it was a lie. This girl was either very lucky or a better liar than I was.

"What makes you think it's a lie?" I asked, smiling and curious. She shrugged. It was luck then.

However, to my dismay, this luck never seemed to fail her. The Celtics say that one time is luck, two times coincidence and three times conspiracy. Clearly, this was a conspiracy.

Whenever I started spinning my tales, she was there with adamant disapproval. After a while, a strange relationship of the accused and the accuser was established between us. One day after school while we were both waiting for our parents to pick us up, she asked me, "Takashi-kun, why do you lie so much?"

I was going to reply with one of my witty comments when I noticed that she had a serious look about her, with none of the cheerfulness that she exuded earlier on the playground. I sighed.

"Because it's nice to be able to make people forget the truth, if only for a moment. Because everyone needs that moment sometimes."

She looked at me, eyes wide, and bit her lip. Was it my imagination, or were her eyes brighter than usual that day? "Will you tell me a story? Until I have to go?"

I looked at this girl in her blue dress and brown pigtails and smiled. "Did you know that…" I admitted defeat for the first time that day; she was a better liar than I was.

From that day on, our relationship changed. She'd still always be around wherever I went, telling me to stop spreading my lies, but it was more of a ritual now between the two of us. Instead of stern admonitions, she went with an exasperated "hai hai" followed by the tug of an ear--usually the left one.

"Takashi. Takashi. Ta-ka-shi." I shake my head to dispel the past from my thoughts and see Chiharu looking up at me with a mixture of concern and impatience in her eyes.

"Eh? Oh. Nothing's wrong. The very sight of your pigtails makes all my worries disappear." I reach out and gently tug one of her pigtails to further reassure her. "Speaking of pigtails, I bet you didn't know that the pigtail has its roots in the Manchu hairstyle during the Qing Dynasty in China."

She throws a fistful of grass at my face. That's my Chiharu-chan.