That Girl

• Priyanka Simini, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2014

Her eyes are pitch black - well the iris is anyways. The centre is a mixture of pearl and silver making each eye a moon shining through the cool night sky. They sit upon a small face that is tanned like the rest of her skin: it's pulled around her bones tightly and covered in a clear solution that shimmers in the dark room, as though she’s been painted with a thousand stars instead of having freckles all over her body.
My eyes travel up to her hair. It's brambles with an occasional sheen of curls that adorn the thorns as fruit. The brambles of her hair are a walnut colour while the fruits a dark chocolate. I focus on her face again. Under the two moons, sits a large pudgy nose, and below that a pair of thin lips glowing a faint silver. There was an air about her that had people call her a graceful snail. It wasn’t that she was slow at what she did they’d said; it was the silver glow about her that mesmerised them even after she left a place.
In that way, whether it was awe or strange looks her appearance always received some sort of attention. Even so, I’d see her every day holding her head up high and walk through the sea of stares. She believed she had a right to be here like everybody else, and that was why she had strived for her freedom and equality all this time, and finally it had been granted for her. Now grateful merely for being accepted, she didn't find it uncomfortable that she looked out of place: a concept she found odd that human girls didn’t understand till this day, even though they only held minor differences.
I reach out and meet my fingertips with hers that lie behind the mirror. The girl contorts her lips - my lips, into lines around my mouth that are barely visible. Something I have known always happens when I smile.
I head towards the bedroom door. I had all of earth was waiting for me to come and explore it. An alien once, but now I was, though not in looks, one of the humans. A friend, a foe, some random person on the street as they called it; I was all of them at once. But most importantly, I was satisfied with just being that girl in the mirror.