Chapter 1: The New Skin

Adia paced the cool tiles of the bathroom in her Bettencourt Mansion suite as fear and anxiety exploded like little fireworks through her bloodstream. She paused to look at her face in the mirror for the hundredth time in a little under half an hour.
“Holy…” She stared traumatized at her reflection.
Nearly half of her, usually, multi-colored skin had meshed into one deep shade of mahogany. Adia couldn’t believe her eyes. Both she and her mother assumed that the identical patch on her back was some kind of late-blooming birthmark or something. That was until earlier that morning when Adia awoke, stumbled sleepy-eyed to the bathroom, and set her blurry vision upon the new skin on her face. In a fit, she pinched, prodded, and even exfoliated with her sea salt face scrub to try and restore her pigments, but to no avail. Her mother busted through the bathroom door in a rush.
“What on earth is"Adia, your face!” She gasped in shock.
“Thanks a lot, mother.” Sarcasm painted Adia’s words.
“Maybe, it’s a fluke with your summer skin.” Arnisse Habib tried to console her, now, teary eyed daughter, but the panic in her voice could not be hidden. “Maybe, your shades shifted a little too much during your Shifting Shades. You are eighteen now and…your body is changing and…the leap from Fall to Winter pigments is quite tricky. I’m sure it’ll all be fine.”
“Your voice and your words are telling me two different things,” Adia said. She lifted her shirt. “And how do you explain the skin on my back?”
“That’s enough, Adia. Put your shirt down and get dressed. You only have a half an hour before the crowning!”
“I can’t go out there like this. It’s gotten worse.”
“Well,” Arnisse said. The sudden idea to use matte lipsticks to fill in some of the spots where Adia’s shades were missing, popped into her mind. “Hand me the blue one. It’ll bring out the lavender of your dress and your winged liner. It’ll add some emotion to your face; a blushing glow. You’ll look innocent"there!” Arnisse finished her last dab of handiwork on her daughter’s face. Adia checked herself out in the mirror.
“I never had blue pigments to begin with. Plus, it doesn’t look like a naturally, emoting, color glow. It just looks like you did a poor painting job on my face,” Adia said. Tears threatened to leave a trail through her mother’s not-yet-dry creation.
“Don’t cry, you’ll ruin it. Besides, you’ll only be up there for a moment…five minutes, tops.”
Adia was mortified, but proceeded to put on her tulle-skirted cocktail dress and head down to the event space, anyway.

# # #

Twenty teenaged youngers lined the pageant stage as they took their final stroll around. The tension in the room was sliceable, well, from Adia’s perspective at least. She was almost certain that the lipstick job that her mother did on her face to fill in her vanishing pigments were beginning to melt under the bright lights. The burrowing eyes of the people out in the crowd only made things worse, as Adia found herself in a nervous sweat. She thought happy thoughts to shift the alarming yellow color glow beginning to emit from her skin to a more pleasant and pageant friendly, purple.
“Purple glows mean joy overflows…and joy means good,” was always what reigning Peach and 2069’s announcer and host, Dixie Bettencourt said whenever she was asked for pageant tips and tricks. She’d won every year since 2066. The only thing that stopped her that year was the fact that she’d turned twenty right before registration. No one under thirteen and over nineteen could participate in Hillford Pointe’s annual winter competition.
“I’ve got this in the bag,” Trev Bettencourt said. He adjusted the cotton boll pinned to the lapel of his hunter green Bettencourt Proper suit jacket. He was Adia’s biggest rival and, unfortunately, the crush of her best friend Earth Blue. She chalked it up to Earth being fairly new to town and not knowing Trev the way she did.
“I don’t think so,” Sarya Washington said. She, along with her identical twin sister Saryn, were also pageant people and Adia’s best friends.
Sarya was a natural in her hot pink wiggle dress and matching winged liner. She spent the whole of the past year being a protégé of Dixie Bettencourt. From the day nine year old Sarya watched thirteen year old Dixie take the pageant stage for the first time, she’d always wanted to follow in her footsteps. She studied her every move. She even learned to emote a purple color glow at will, just like her. Unlike her sister, Saryn Washington only did pageants because of Adia and Sarya. She was not graceful. For the life of her, she couldn’t even figure out how to emote a purple glow under such nail-biting circumstances. The closest she would get was a queasy maroon.
“I think I’m going to sneeze,” Saryn projected. She used her thoughts to communicate with Adia because whispering, like everyone else, was never something she was too good at.
“Try and hold it in. We’ll only be here for another second or two. Also, stop projecting; your glows aren’t quite mixing well,” Adia said, referring to the way in which Saryn’s nauseous maroon anti-blended with the white, projecting glow radiating off the tip of her ears.
“I don’t think I can h"‘Atchoo!’” In that moment, Saryn wished the sound she had just released could have also been projected in her mind. More than anything, she wished she could just rewind the moment and remove herself from the stage completely. The impact of her sneeze sent the zipper flying off of her own formfitting, mint green, wiggle dress and into Adia’s right eye.
“I’m so sorry!” Saryn ran from the stage in a cloud of alarming yellow color glow. Adia, not one to quit, stood head high while her offended right eye leaked with tears. No one seemed to even notice the debacle that had just ensued.
“And the winner of the Peach Pageant for the year 2069 is…Trev Bettencourt of Hillford Pointe!”
Applause filled the room as Trev, overtaken with joyful glee was crowned and given a bouquet of assorted Georgia-native wildflowers that he fist-pumped into the air. Sarya Washington was sashed with runner-up and all the contestants along with their families headed to the Bettencourt Gardens for a celebratory brunch. Adia’s right eye steady dripped with tears as she tried her best to avoid her, sure to be displeased, mother.

# # #

“Adia, I am so sorry,” Saryn said.
“I don’t think anyone noticed what happened with the music and all the focus being on how flaming Trev looked in his day suit,” Earth Blue said. In that moment, Sarya along with Trev, his victor’s crown a’ shinin’, waltzed up to the chatting friends. A blushing blue glow tinted Earth’s skin.
“Don’t cry, chickadee, we’ll get ‘em next time.” Sarya had just noticed Adia’s watery bloodshot eye. Trev squinted; a sort of confusion crossed his face. Adia suddenly remembered the atrocity her mother inflicted on her just hours before.
“Wait, what’s wrong with your face? Is that…is that lipstick on your fa"” Trev’s voice seemed to have carried over the soft playing music. Arnisse Habib, only steps away, gasped in horror. She grabbed Adia by the arm and whisked her out to the car faster than he could finish his sentence.

# # #

Upon arriving at Hillford Gathering, the community center for Hillford Pointe residents, Adia and Arnisse were greeted by a bustling parking lot.
“You know there was a time when people only came here on Sundays,” Arnisse said.
Her frustration caused her to miss a parking space.
“Pull down your hood and stick close to me. Don’t talk to anyone and I mean no one.”
She reversed her car and backed into the spot before someone else could snag it. Arnisse glided out of her sleek, white-as-a-cloud 2069 Ambrosia Model 3. Her spiked heels clip-clopped on the parking lot pavement as Adia shuffled not far behind. A familiar voice shouted from a distance.
“Arnisse, Adia!” Arnisse took ahold of Adia’s arm nearly dragging her onward through the sliding glass doors.

# # #

“Hello, Arnisse and Andreus?” The confused secretary looked past Arnisse to her hooded child.
“No, it’s not Andreus,” Arnisse said. Her voice went no higher than a whisper.
“Adia?” the secretary asked.
“Yes, Glimmer. Now, quiet down.”
Glimmer Gary nodded apologetically.
“Why is Adia dressed like her brother?” Glimmer’s curiosity triggered a magenta color glow, causing the lavender pigments in her skin to pop. Adia always envied Glimmer’s lavender pigments.
“Um, it’s an emergency and we need to see Dr. Peter immediately.”
“Ok, so what’s the reason for your visit?” Glimmer slowly filled the empty spaces of a visitor slip with the necessary information.
“It’s a private matter,” Arnisse said. Her voice quivered with restraint.
“Ok, let’s see what we have here. Clariyan: Schedule.” Under her command, Glimmer’s computer whistled and the January calendar popped onto the screen. “Thank you, Clariyan.”
“My pleasure,” the smokey, baritone of the Operating System said.
Glimmer nonchalantly air scrolled her screen as Adia looked on in amazement.
“Can you believe we still have ancient touchscreen at my house?”
Arnisse shushed her daughter and tapped her foot impatiently.
“Well?” Her frustration steady rose with each second not spent in Dr. Peter’s office.
“Well, it looks like I can fit you in tomorrow at noon.”
“Are you kidding me?” Adia shushed her mother’s not-so-inside-voice to no avail. “We cannot wait until tomorrow. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY.”
“STOP.” Adia’s volume matched her mother’s. She ripped the hood from her head. Both her mother and Glimmer inhaled in surprise, simultaneously shining shades of shocking yellow.
“This is the emergency,” Adia said. She coolly, pointed to the new one-toned skin on her face.
# # #

“Hello, ladies,” Dr. Peter said. His voice was muffled. Arnisse and Adia had walked in on him eating lunch in his office. Arnisse’s alarmed yellow glow had yet to subside. It made the usually non-glowing, daffodil pigments in her multi-colored skin radiate in an eye-watering way.
“Arnisse Habib, you’re alarmed. You need water.” Dr. Peter jumped to his feet and poured Mrs. Habib a glass of icy water.
“Here, drink.” He placed the frosty cup into her hands, then turned his attention toward Adia. “What’s going on?” His eyes of concern was fully focused on the hooded girl with her head down.
Adia shuffled in her seat. The, always comforting, air foam arm chair offered no sense of support. She slowly pulled her hood off again, exposing the source of her mother’s distress.
“Oh my, dear girl.” Dr. Peter tilted Adia’s face to the side to get a better look at the new skin threatening to cover the whole right side of her face. Her right eye was still bloodshot, but not tearful to Adia’s relief
“What am I gonna do?” asked Arnisse. She was finally able to speak again. Adia, less appalled by her face and more by her mother, exhaled an audible breath through her mouth.
“Is it really that big a deal?”
“Well, according to history it is,” Dr. Peter said. He retook his seat across the desk.
“To be honest, Adia you aren’t the first one of our time to have this issue. Over the years, since our one-toned ancestors became more few and far between, there have been many aftereffects where skin has been concerned.”
“So, will it just correct itself or do we need to go to a dermatologist?” Arnisse asked.
“Well, it depends. The only cases I’ve known were cases where the child was born with maybe an arm or leg or concentrated space that was of one tone. In those cases, 100% of the children were multi-hued by age five. There was even a case in India where a child was born completely one-toned, but like the others, by age five…”
“So, Adia has a completely unique case is what you’re trying to say?” A dip in Arnisse’s belly erected the hairs down her arms and the back of her neck. Her face burned into glowing, blotchy, sections of queasy maroon.
“What?” Adia said. She suspiciously looked over at her stiff mother.
Projecting her words through her mind over to Dr. Peter, Arnisse said, “It’s because of him isn’t it?”
“Quite possibly so,” Dr. Peter said, accepting her projection.
“STOP THAT, YOU TWO. I know you’re projecting. Your ear tips are glowing white.”
Dr. Peter looked at Mrs. Habib and then at her daughter.
“How do we fix it?” Her words were aloud this time.
“Maude was the last one to talk with him but she’s dead,” said Dr. Peter. “Your only other option is to go up to The Hill.”
The blinding yellow, swiftly, returned to Arnisse’s skin.

Author's Note

Hi!
Welcome to the first chapter of my first attempt at writing a novel! I would love feedback. Is it interesting to you? Is it clear? Do you want to read more? Thank you!