Turn 11 of 17

You pout, and continue to beg, not understanding that Mia wont be changing you back as your browneyes fade to a bright dolls blue and your hair gains an unbatural platinum blonde look that sweeps down from the roots. Straight and even glossier your hair could only be maintained with expensive and co stant salon trips

"No, no, please, Mia, like — baby, I'll literally do anything," you pout, and the pout itself is a betrayal, the plush new lips pushing into a perfect glossy sulk that belongs on a poster. "I'll change, okay? I'll be so good. You're so pretty and I love you so much, just — just turn it off? Please?" You reach for her hand with your manicured fingers, and every word is sweet, simple, filler-laden, and you still don't hear it.

"You're begging," Mia says, delighted and calm. "That counts, sweetheart. That counts so much."

The cold starts behind your eyes. You feel it as a thin, bright chill, like looking into a freezer light, and in the mirror your irises begin to pale — brown draining from the center outward, honey to hazel to a vivid, glassy, unmistakable blue. Doll blue. Contact-lens blue, except it's your eyes now, wide and luminous and faintly vacant above the flushed bronze cheeks, blinking with thick lashes at a stranger.

Then your scalp prickles, and you watch the blonde come in. It starts at the roots and sweeps downward like light poured through your hair, brown lifting strand by strand through caramel and gold until it lands on platinum — not the soft, believable blonde some girls are born to, but the bright, icy, maintained platinum that takes six hours and a fortune and a standing appointment every three weeks. The wave smooths out as it lightens, the strands straightening to a sleek, glassy fall that pours over your shoulders and down your back like poured silk, shining under the bathroom bulb.

You stare at the whole finished thing. Blue doll eyes, platinum sheet-gloss hair, the overfilled face, the salon tan, the bought body, the pastel nails, the little thong. There is nothing of you left on the surface. Not one thing.

"Her," Mia says softly, turning your chin toward the mirror with one finger. "You know exactly who this is. You told your friends she was the dumbest girl you'd ever met. And now, sweetheart — you're the one who can't even argue anymore."