But there is a deeper thing to understand about my sister that night, and it took me a long time to see it clearly, because it required me to stop thinking of Gwen as simply cruel and start understanding why.

Because the question that haunted me, afterward, was not how she could be so vicious, but why she had aimed that viciousness at Maya specifically, at a sixteen-year-old girl with birthmarks, a target so undeserving and so defenseless.

And the answer, when I finally understood it, was almost pitiable.

Gwen attacked Maya’s confidence because Maya’s confidence was unbearable to her.

Here was a girl who had every conventional reason to feel inadequate, who did not fit any standard of flawless beauty, whose skin the world had spent sixteen years telling her was wrong, and who had, somehow, arrived at a genuine, unshakeable peace with herself anyway.