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Sakusa Kiyoomi had always been an average-looking girl. Not overly pretty, not ugly. Usually.
Well, no. Her teeth were crooked. They always had been. She'd gotten bullied relentlessly for that and her previously loud nature, and everything. She despised looking at childhood pictures. She'd always been ugly , in her eyes. There were maybe one or two good pictures taken of her once in a blue moon, and the rest were horrendous.
Motoya liked to lie to her, saying they weren't that bad. She scoffed each one off, refused to look at childhood pictures past infancy, and deleted any pictures of herself that she hated from her phone. The number increased with every pass through her camera roll and she always wondered how some of these passed inspection. She'd felt nice for a while, like maybe she was pretty, at least a little.
Getting ready for school that morning, though, ruined everything. The moment she looked in the mirror her nose wrinkled. A million dissatisfactions came rushing to the surface; nose too wide, blackheads littering it, her pores and skin having a texture similar to a dead leaf that had had holes eaten into it. Visibly. She wondered what insects were ruining her beauty, eating dips and holes into her skin until she looked no longer herself. Even after washing her face, it did nothing.
Makeup would fix it. She wasn't allowed to have much – she only had eyeliner and lip gloss, but she'd saved her face before. Already the urge to scratch her skin was surfacing. Atrocious. She looked atrocious. She still applied eyeliner, lined her lips, put on her lip gloss. The result was somehow worse than the original. She looked ridiculous.
She could just tear it off– she couldn't be ugly without a face –and finally cry in peace, dig into the muscle and tear and tear away until she no longer looked like a pig. Until she no longer looked disgusting.
She hated Miya. Both twins looked effortlessly attractive, but her Miya was particularly horrible. Complimenting Kiyoomi, wasting her breath on little lies about how she wished she had smaller tits, or how Kiyoomi looked really good today, she loved Kiyoomi’s nose, or something equally flattering but untrue.
Tears came, of their own accord, and the tremble in Kiyoomi’s hands increased. Desperation and disgust crawled up her throat like bile. And so to Mother she went, knocking on the bedroom door and containing her absolutely pathetic cries behind a hand. At getting permission to enter, she threw the door open and the sobs escaped full force.
“Momma, c-can I… can I borrow your makeup please,” she questioned through her teeth, unable to stand the look of disgust on the woman’s face. Her sobs doubled her over and she wished she hadn't heard the sigh.
“Kiyoomi, you don't need to wear any of that. Who the fuck are you trying to impress? Are you crying because none of the little boys at school want you? I wouldn't either , with what you're doing right now.”
“Momma, please,” she choked out, and she felt nothing short of pathetic. “It's not for a boy, I don't even like –”
“Here we go. Fine, Kiyoomi, get out of my face with that crap. You're crying loud enough to wake your sister up.”
She took the makeup bag and left, settling back in front of the mirror. She knew how to do makeup, of course, she had friends . So she should have looked nice at the end of it. Not too pale, sickly, and even uglier than before.
She wondered if Miya would still have the gall to lie to her and call her pretty if she saw Kiyoomi now. She looked like a joke. She looked like a fucking joke. She wondered if Miya would find her pretty, now. She wondered if Miya would like them like this. If she would even continue wasting her time on her if she knew this side of her.
You could put lipstick on a pig, but it was still a pig.
You could put makeup on an ugly girl, but she would always be ugly.