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"They won't come off."
Paige Guthrie frowned at the image reflected back at her. Spots that alternated between red and brown dotted her cheeks, now blotchy thanks to her rubbing them roughly with the wet cloth in her right hand.
"What're you doing?" Paige didn't bother glancing up as her beloved but sometimes dense older brother poked his head into the doorway after hearing her distress call. Thick blond eyebrows raised. "Somethin' wrong?"
Paige nodded mutely, pointing to her face. Sam shrugged, making Paige sigh heavily. "They won't go away."
"They...huh?"
"The dots. I've tried and tried to get 'em to come off, and they won't!"
Sam carefully hid a chuckle to avoid hurting his little sister's feelings. Walking into the bathroom, he noticed a wide variety of skin creams lining the sink, and he began to put them back into the cabinet before their mother came in and noticed. "Hate to break it to you, sis, but those are called freckles, and they're gonna stay there."
Paige's eyes widened. "Forever?"
Sam looked over at her, bottles cradled in his arms. "'Fraid so."
"But..." Paige's lower lip quivered as she looked down at the rag in her hand, currently dripping all over the tiled bathroom floor. "But..."
Sam checked a sigh to keep it from escaping; he really didn't mean to sound so impatient with Paige. She was only six, after all, but sometimes she amazed him with how stubborn she could be.
"Paigey," he started, helping her down from the chair she had dragged into the room and was now standing on, "they're just freckles. They're not gonna go away. Besides, they actually make you look cute."
Paige's chin jutted forward, her customary gesture that signified her inherit obstinance. Sam knew he had made a mistake but was not given a chance to correct himself before his sister rebutted. "I don't wanna look 'cute,' Sammie, I wanna be ... pretty," she asserted after a moment given to think. "Not cute."
"You are pretty, Paige, even if I still think you're too young to be worrying about that just yet," Sam argued as he put the last of the bottles in the overhead medicine cabinet and led the girl from the room. She flipped her long blond hair out of her face and stomped away from him, hoping he wouldn't notice the shimmering tears building in her light blue eyes. Paige had forgotten that the two of them had always been close, meaning Sam would undoubtedly know when something was bothering her.
She had barely managed to get out on the back porch before Sam caught up with her, seating himself uninvited on the swing beside her. "What's wrong, Paige? Why are you worrying so much about your freckles now?"
Paige shrugged wordlessly, taking a false but intense interest in the links of the chain that led up to the ceiling. "They make me look stupid."
"No, they don't."
"Do so."
"Do not."
"Do so!"
"Do...Look, I ain't gonna sit here and debate this with you. But I'm telling you, Paige, you look fine. What's the big deal?"
Paige looked up, revealing unshed tears that made her eyes shimmer. "They made fun of me."
"Who?"
She looked down at her Pooh Bear tennis shoes, kicking them restlessly and wishing fervently she was tall enough to reach the ground like Sam was. "The kids at school."
"Because of freckles?" Paige nodded slightly, making Sam snort. "That's stupid."
"They said I looked like...Pipi Longstocking," Paige's nose wrinkled at remembering the boy who sat behind her that kept tugging on her braids and ruthlessly chanting that name at her. "I don't even know who that is! But I guess it's not good."
"They're just teasing you, Paige. Just kids bein' kids. Don't listen to 'em."
"Easy for you to say." Paige leaned back in the swing and folded her arms across her chest, staring out at the trees in the yard that were turning an eerie red shade due to the setting sun.
Sam shared a moment of silence with his sister before reaching into his back pocket and pulling from it a worn brown wallet. He'd begged his father for one just like his, and he'd finally gotten it for his birthday earlier in the year. Somehow, it made him feel that much more grown up.
He leafed through the pictures in it, finally finding the one he had been hunting, and he leaned over to show it to Paige.
"You think you got it so bad 'cause you got freckles. Look at her." He pointed to the young girl in the picture, light blue skin and straight white hair standing out sharply from one another. Paige's eyes widened. "Her name's Jackie. She's a mutant. People make fun of her, too, but she doesn't let it bother her that much." He looked up at Paige to see her still watching the photo intently. "She's also one of my best friends. Some people don't just bother to go by looks."
"But..."
"But nothing, Paige. If freckles are the biggest things you ever gotta worry about, you're lucky. Just imagine what this poor girl's gonna have to deal with the rest of her life."
Paige gulped, backing away to nestle against the armrest of the swing, drawing her thin knees up to her chest and linking her arms around them. "Does she get called things like 'freckle-face'? Or Pipi?"
"Worse." Sam slid the wallet back into his pocket, turning to better see his sister. "A lot worse."
For the first time that evening, Paige seemed to be coming out of her self-induced funk. She looked up at the trees in the yard, then back to Sam. "Guess freckles really ain't that bad." She looked up suddenly. "So...not everybody'll always call me names?"
Sam shook his head and rose to his feet, offering his hand to help Paige jump down from the high swing. "Promise. Not everybody'll always go by how you look. Hopefully you won't, either."
Paige considered the thought, chewing on her bottom lip in the process, then shrugged it away and raced her brother back into the house to get to the last popsicle in the freezer.
Paige looked back at her sleeping boyfriend, a strange sight given that he didn't particularly need to sleep. She had even begun wondering if he did at all. Of course, she was also beginning to see why he had such a large bed to be so skinny; his arms and legs seemed to attempt to cover the entire bed, blankets twisted impossibly around his ankles and snaked up to cover his stomach. The bandages that wound from his upper ribcage to his face had started to unravel a bit, letting a glimmer of light blue energy seep out and cast a whitish glow on his already pale face. Long scars raced up from behind the bandages and stopped at unusually high cheekbones for a male; Paige smirked to herself as she remembered the look on Jono's less-than-expressive face when she had begged to put blush on him, just because she had told him he had perfect bone structure for it.
She turned from the window to face him, arms wrapped around herself. Sam was right; she hadn't grown up the same way as the others in her school had, trained to distrust and dislike anyone not like them. She wondered if Sam had known his baby sister would eventually fall for someone that was a complete one-eighty of her, then decided to stop thinking about it, instead opting to look at the mirror. Moments earlier she had husked into a rare form, her natural one, dotted cheeks and all. The freckles were still there, still as prominent as they had been years earlier when she had thought the world was ending because they simply refused to go away.
Looking cautiously at Jono, however, she realized that maybe Sam was right. Maybe she truly was the lucky one.