Her eyes snapped shut and darkness surrounds her, a checkerboard floor manifesting beneath her. Her eyelids slowly peeled back, shifting around and scanning her surroundings. Silent. Nobody. No beginning. No ending.

However, the pitter pattering of feet overtook the rest of her senses. Glossy shoes peeked out from the shadows, long slender legs, vast torso, and arms. It had a body of a finely dressed man of height, yet, there was a head of a gazelle. His black eyes focused on the biracial girl before him and a subtle smirk grazed over his lips.

“They’re staring at you.” Jabari’s words were soft and comforting yet his words raked down her back like jagged claws. “How does it feel? I bet it burns doesn’t it?” The voice was mellifluous and influential, influential enough to change the environment around them both.

Jabari raised a hand against her, shackles around his wrist dangling and making continuous clicking noises against each other, and she released a painful yowl as a set true damage had been dealt against her. Claws dragged down her back and the temperature raised to incinerating as the walls and surroundings turned red.

She collapsed to her knees with tears flowing like waterfalls spewing from the earth. “I hate this…” She sobbed, lifting up a hand to wipe the continuously streaming tears with the heels of her hand.

Jabari walked closer to her and cupped her chin with his index finger and thumb with hostile comfort. His black eyes locked with hers, catching her full attention until he suddenly yelled in a booming voice, “RUN!”

She snapped back into reality. First, she appeared to be out of focus and had silently sat on the couch in the living room of her cousin’s house, and now, without her knowing, she had ran off into the family bathroom of her cousin’s house and was now slumped against the sink, her fingers clutching onto the marble. She panted heavily and choked out a subtle sob, splashing her face in the cold water that dribbled from the faucet. Nothing but the F bomb detonated through her head like mental landmines as she pulled back to dry her face off. Her fingers grazed over her throat before coming to a halt, gradually starting to squeeze.

She restricted her own breath until her body forbade her from going any further. She let go of her throat and stared down at her caramel hands, white splotches of vitiligo running down her arms and the rest of her body. It was hard being biracial. Pressuring, almost.

She was raised in a white household for all her life. White mother, white sister, white everything. She was the brown egg in a carton of white ones, yet still had the same yolk. Her distant family, on the white side, didn’t see her in the same matter.

“Why is she here?”

“Who is she?”

“Where’s your dad?”

Those were the questions thrown at her often by her young, innocent cousins and even some older ones, that of whom were aware of the words spewn out of their mouths. She was as mixed as chocolate milk, yet they had seen her as bubble tea with neither party having anything in common. She was just.. Black. Not mixed, not anything. Perhaps just some black, light skinned girl adopted into the family. She was a mixed girl with a white mom and an absent father who took the darkness of the night and wrapped it around his skin like a cloak.

Just before her.. Intermission with Jabari and panicking off to the bathroom, she had merely put one foot in front of the other with the thought already in her head she was going to stick out like a sore thumb. She dressed white, talked white, acted white, but was still black and different. She had sat down with her favorite white cousin Rose until she had to dismiss herself, leaving her stranded as a brown wolf in a field of white rabbits.

Those eyes pierced into her from all angles as if they just saw something out of pocket for the first time. What was so special about her, anyway? They had a darker skinned, Guatemalan  cousin in law to marvel at, Dimingo, but that wasn’t enough for them. Those jagged eyes dug observational knives into her body, causing her to finally flee into her caged, tortured mind and into the bathroom once the silent torture was enough to make her crack like the brown egg she was.