Growing up and even now in her final months of adolescence, Tomi had longed to look like Her. Yet even then in that regard, she wasn't unique – every Black girl wanted to look like Her. 

It was an unspoken law of the land of sorts, a hushed knowledge that few folks admitted and seldom wanted to discuss. Ignorance was indeed bliss you could say... unless in your very existence as a dark-skinned woman of color you embodied the equivalent of an ugly ink splatter on a crisp new church dress. A stain is what Tomi had subconsciously grown to compare herself to, as that was what she had always been made to think. It had taken her a while to see it, perhaps due to her lapse in learning during the first three years of her mother's sickness, to recognize that her hometown smiled only upon certain shades of brown.  It was a somber truth that the darkening of her skin under the sun – already  melanin rich at birth –  bore a constant reminder of. And it was not long after she did finally acknowledge that perhaps this town wasn't as  rooted in equity as everyone preached it to be,  that she finally understood how many ways there were to be racist.

In the throngs of the first grade, Tomi had slipped into the classroom from her ailing mother's side, a black sheep lost in a sea of all-white children. She hadn't thought much of it then –  the ‘you don't sound Black' and the ‘you should play basketball! You look like you'd be good at it"  –  things small white children in her town deemed appropriate points of conversation. However this was before she'd taken the liberty of doing her own research. It wasn't as though there were many people of color in her community to begin with – four or less Black families from the opposite end of town, two of which only revealed themselves to the town every Sunday at church. Yet even in the gaping absence of Blackness in her life (with the exception of Sundays), she'd seen it in them too. Generations of internalized hatred, the instinctual longing for lighter skin and looser curls, ways of thinking deeply ingrained after generations of observing society's ideal Black girl. She couldn't look to other Black families, or her own family, or anyone for the racial validation she needed, nor did she want to. 

But then there She was:  Zoelle, a Venn diagram of blood and bone and a liminal space in the throes of small town racism... An exception. A satiation to their preference for the lighter shades of brown. It was Her Black mother's caramel skin and soft curls and Her White father's sharp hazel eyes and sultry way of speaking that struck interest among Tomi's peers and made Zoelle a prize. It was these same variables that had left Tomi stricken with envy and insecurity. It felt stupid at times, as though they were but children competing for the affection of a negligent parent – or in this case a dying town. 

Older now, Tomi felt different. 

Yes, she was sure despite having the town's favor, Zoelle had faced bigotry of her own... she'd seen the way people stared and talked about her as though she were a strange exotic bird. Yet still, Tomi remained sour in her jealousy. 

It was this unspoken law of the land, this town's rejection of her skin, that ultimately made Tomi unravel and wither away before the eyes of her world: Even as they were watching, they couldn't see her disappearing, whittled away by the travail of systemic colorism. It was the same disease that had claimed the life of her mother, but diseases of this sort seldom saw light beyond the mind.