Volume Two: The Second Blemish
Chapter 2
I want it on the record that I tried everything a normal amount of money can buy before I let myself believe something impossible was happening to my face.
I started with the good concealer, the one my dermatologist's office sells for the price of a small appliance. I dabbed it on with the little brush, blended it with the sponge, set it with powder the way the tutorials tell you to. The pimple sat there underneath it all like a lit coal under a blanket — you could still see the shape of the heat.
So I tried the medicated stuff next, the kind that promises to shrink a blemish overnight. By ten a.m. it had done the opposite. The thing had somehow gotten redder, angrier, more perfectly centered on my cheekbone than a professional cartographer could have placed it. I stood in my bathroom for twenty full minutes with three different concealers lined up on the counter like a firing squad, and every single one of them made it worse instead of better, which should not be possible. Concealer's entire purpose is to conceal. This felt personal.
By Thursday I'd made an emergency appointment with Dr. Okafor, who has managed my skin since I was fourteen and has never once found anything actually wrong with it. She frowned at the blemish under her little magnifying light for a long time, turned my face gently side to side, and finally sat back with the particular expression doctors get when the chart in front of them refuses to agree with what their eyes are seeing.
"It's not cystic," she said. "It's not hormonal, based on your bloodwork from June. It's not an allergic reaction — I don't see any of the markers I'd expect. Honestly, Sienna, structurally, this shouldn't really be here at all."
"But it is here."
"It is very much here," she agreed, and prescribed me a cream that, deep down, in a place I wasn't ready to listen to yet, I already suspected wouldn't do a single thing.
* * *
I told myself I could still control the story. That's the trick with anything humiliating — you get ahead of it before anyone else can frame it for you. So in Ethics of Innovation on Thursday, when Noah slid into the seat beside me, I'd already decided I was going to be breezy about it. Unbothered. A woman who simply had a blemish, the way ordinary women sometimes do, and was not going to make a whole production out of it.
Noah looked at me for slightly longer than a normal hello requires. Not at my eyes. At my cheek.
"There's something weird about that," he said.
"Excuse me?"
"The mark. On your face." He tilted his head, squinting slightly behind those thick lenses of his, the way you'd look at a math problem that had produced a genuinely strange answer. "There's a kind of — I don't know how to describe it. A pink shimmer around the edge of it. Like heat coming off asphalt, but pink. Has something weird happened to you? Recently, I mean."
For one unbearable second I actually considered telling him about the dream. About Delia's eyes in the corridor, about the mirror, about the woman with wings made of light who'd told me I chose to be exactly what everyone already expected of me. I opened my mouth. And then old, reliable instinct kicked back in, the one that's never once let a Bennett-sweater-wearing nobody see me be anything other than completely composed.
"Wow," I said instead. "Is making fun of my skin really the best material you've got? I expected more from someone who talks for four minutes straight about ethics."
He didn't flinch, which somehow annoyed me more than if he had. "I wasn't making fun of you."
"Sure you weren't."
He didn't say anything else for the rest of class. I decided that meant I'd won.
* * *
I did not win.
At lunch, I was standing at the register in the dining hall with Blair, mid-sentence about absolutely nothing important, when one of the cafeteria staff — a guy about our age, name tag said Marcus, though I didn't clock that until much later, when it mattered — turned too fast with a full carafe of coffee and caught the strap of my bag.
It wasn't even that much coffee. If I'm being honest with myself now, in the calm, unglamorous light of hindsight, it was maybe a tablespoon, and the bag was already scuffed on the bottom from being set down on a hundred different floors. But in that exact moment, in front of Blair and half the junior class, with a blemish already blooming across my face that I couldn't explain and couldn't cover and absolutely could not stand one more person noticing —
I snapped.
"Are you serious?" My voice came out louder than I meant it to, sharper, the kind of voice that makes a room quiet down to listen. "This bag cost more than you probably make in a month, and you can't manage to pour coffee in a straight line?"
Marcus went red. Muttered something that might have been sorry. I kept going anyway, because once I start I have never, not once in my entire life, known how to stop before I've said the worst possible version of the thing — something about paying attention, something about maybe this job wasn't for everyone, something I'm not proud enough of to write down in full.
I felt it happen before I saw it. A tight, hot little pinch, high on my other cheek this time, blooming under the skin like a bruise in reverse.
Blair's face changed first. She was staring at my cheek with an expression I'd never seen on her before — somewhere between fascinated and afraid.
"Sienna," she said carefully. "There's — okay, there's a second one now."
I don't remember deciding to run. I just remember the dining hall doors, and then the corridor, and then the girls' bathroom, empty, blessedly empty, and my own face in the mirror above the sinks with two identical, furious red marks glowing on either cheekbone like a matched set of alarms.
The door opened behind me. I turned, ready to scream at whoever it was to get out, and found Noah standing there instead, half in and half out of a bathroom that was very clearly not his.
"This is the girls' room," I said, my voice shaking in a way I hated.
"I know. I saw you run." He hesitated on the threshold for exactly one second, then stepped the rest of the way in and let the door swing shut behind him. "Sienna. Look at the mirror. Not at yourself. At the glass around you."
I didn't want to. I did it anyway.
At first I thought it was a trick of the fluorescent lights, some kind of reflection off the tile. But the longer I looked, the more it resolved into something else entirely — faint lines of writing, gold and shifting, curling across the surface of the mirror like something breathing underneath the glass. I couldn't read all of it. What I could read made my stomach drop:
second mark: cruelty toward one who could not defend himself.
"You can see that?" I whispered.
"I've been able to see it since Tuesday," Noah said. "Since the first one showed up. I didn't say anything because I genuinely thought I was losing my mind, and then I thought maybe you already knew and just didn't want anyone else to." He came closer, cautiously, the way you'd approach something that might bolt. "Every time you've done something — cruel, I guess, is the word — there's this flare of light around you for a second. Then it's gone, and you've got a new mark. It's not makeup-resistant acne, Sienna. It's tracking you."
"That's insane."
"I'm aware of how it sounds."
I laughed, and it came out wrong, too high, too close to something else entirely. "So what, I'm cursed? Is that what you're telling me? Some kind of — of magic mirror is judging my personality?"
Noah didn't laugh back, which is how I knew, somewhere underneath all my denial, that he wasn't joking either.
"I don't know what it is," he admitted. "I just know I can see it, and you clearly can't, and whatever it is, it isn't done."
* * *
It wasn't done.
That night I didn't even bother pretending to sleep first. I sat up in bed with the lights on, waiting, because some instinct told me waiting was the only useful thing left to do. Around midnight, the air in my room changed — went thick and warm, like the moment before a storm — and when I looked up, Delia Rose was standing at the foot of my bed like she'd always been there, gray uniform and silver hair and all, except this time I was awake, and this time I didn't laugh.
"You're real," I said. "You're actually — this is actually happening."
"It was always actually happening," she said. "You simply preferred the version where it wasn't."
"What did you do to my face?"
"I didn't do anything to your face, child. I showed you the truth that was already living underneath it." She moved closer, and in the lamplight her eyes had that same impossible color, water over stone, patient in a way that made me want to look away and couldn't. "Every time you choose cruelty over kindness — real cruelty, meant to wound — it will show. There is no cream for that. No amount of your mother's money will cover it."
"How long?" My voice cracked on the second word, and I hated it.
"One semester," she said. "Six weeks, if you'd rather think of it in a length of time that frightens you more. In that window, you will learn to treat people as though they matter regardless of what they can offer you, or you will not. If you do not, I promise you, Sienna Hart, this will be the smallest of your problems by the time the marks are finished with you."
"And if I do learn? If I'm — nice, or whatever you want, for six weeks?"
Something in her expression softened, just slightly, like a door opening a crack. "Then it ends. But I should warn you — kindness performed for an audience, kindness done to erase a mark rather than because you mean it, will not satisfy the curse. It will only make things worse. This isn't a test you can cheat your way through by being clever. You've been clever your whole life. It's gotten you exactly here."
She was gone before I could answer, the way people only ever leave in dreams and, apparently, in whatever this was instead. I sat alone in my too-bright room for a long time afterward, staring at my own reflection in the dark closet mirror across the room, at the two small red marks that no longer looked like ordinary blemishes at all now that I knew what they were.
In the glass, faint and gold and fading even as I watched it, one last line of that strange shimmering script curled into view and then was gone.
In six weeks, it seemed to say, this face will tell everyone exactly who you decided to be.
I turned off the light. I did not sleep.