Her hair is a natural auburn, ablaze like the fire in her perfect green eyes. Her hands are small and dainty, free of any dirt and toil. Her clothes are pressed and clean, perfectly forming around her slender body. Her legs are long and lanky, reaching all the way up to the heavens. And when she laughs or smiles the world seems to glow and problems vanish for only a moment. And yes, she is perfect. She is that girl everyone wants to be, or befriend or date. She’s that girl who's going to make it big and become a star. She’ll be prom queen, and valedictorian and go to an Ivy League school. And she’ll marry a lawyer or a doctor and live in a fancy house uptown. She’ll have perfect children that never cry and they will be the poster family for poster families.

And society will never know the truth. Society will never know just how wrong they are. For she is not perfect. No one will ever know how she cries herself to sleep every night, wishing that her parents loved her. No one will ever know that a savage lives under those perfect eyes. That she’s called people names that would make her grandmother weep. No one will understand why she always wears long sleeves, to hide the torture of her adolescence. No one will know that some days, most days, she just wants to give up. To stop being perfect just for a moment. To cry into the abyss of humanity that she is broken, that she is not who they think she is. But she can’t. She must continue to push herself to the limit. To smile at others and be polite. To get those perfect grades and be the perfect child her parents demand. To make them proud, it’s all she ever wanted. To have people look at her and think, “Wow, she’s really got it together.” Little will that person know the war that rages inside her soul. And she’ll keep pushing it down and down, until she forgets about it and feels that she truly is perfect. And when she leasts expects it, it will come back. Stronger and nastier than ever before. And every day it will remind her that she is living a lie, that she is a lie. And inevitability, as pain tends to do, it will destroy her. And family and friends will wonder, how someone so perfect and happy, could have done such an unspeakable thing. How could she, the best of us all, be gone? No one will ever think, that the girl who smiles the widest, cries the most inside. Oh well, society’s mistake.