Backstage: the sigh of the black curtains as they whispered their dusty secrets to invisible auras; the dark, comforting shield that hid all that needed to be concealed; and the almost as uncomfortable air of disappointment that was tangible before the next show of The Master Illusionist even started. Grejes was already angry, and Olivia hadn't even done anything wrong yet.

"I don't want to," she whispered fiercely.

“I won't have you as some sort of dud," Grejes hissed, referring to the fact that she was testing at age fourteen instead of the traditional twelve. "You have to graduate, Olivia. Only one out of fifty thousand people have your genetic trait, so you'd better do something useful with it. And that's besides sitting in my classroom, watching me with that arrogant, bored look on your face."

"I don't want to mess up someone's life,'" Olivia protested. "And besides, if I fail, people will say 'Grejes' students mess people up', and not 'Look, all of Grejes' fifteen students are so extremely positively excellent'."

"Shut up," her teacher spat. In his anger the features on his face seemed to blur and distort themselves. "You only see what you want to see. If you wanted to see the right thing you'd realize that you're going to pass because I'm going to make you."

"I just can't do it," Olivia said softly, sensing that her teacher was about to go over the edge. "Please, I can't, I really can't. I'd be ready in a few more years, honestly..."

Grejes looked at his watch, and as he calmed down the blurring around him seemed to settle into something more hard and definite. "Olivia Fennwick, our next show starts in fifteen minutes. Please prepare to take part in the demonstration at that time."

Olivia gaped at him. "But--" Her teacher looked at her sharply before walking away.

Ray could only stare. The people walking on stage were more beautiful than any she had ever seen before. They paraded back and forth on a platform, smiling with perfect white teeth and blinking luminous eyes. Then they twirled and became birds, soaring through the theater on silky black wings and serenading the audience with voices like enchanted bells. Landing silently back on the stage, the shape- shifters transformed back into perfectly proportioned people and started to do back flips. From the astonished looks on their beautiful faces, it was obvious that this ability was completely new to them.

So this is what all the girls at school were talking about, Ray thought. To look perfect, to be able to do anything, to have people love you the minute they set their eyes on you... twenty grand is such a small price to pay. And yet it had cost so much: Father had gotten another job, Mom had rented out the extra bedroom, and Ray had begun babysitting almost every evening. They all ended the day exhausted, and often fell asleep while eating dinner. All so that Ray could look better-- and be better, she reminded herself-- than about twenty of the people at her school. At least her situation would improve, though; she currently ranked on the rock bottom of the social hierarchy.

"Applicants with green cards, please enter the room next to the stage," the intercom crackled, "the demonstration will begin shortly..."

She slipped through the door after nineteen elderly people and found herself in a dingy, cramped chamber with a single sofa squished into the corner. The walls were all painted blood red, except for the one on her right that was covered in a shiny, metallic coating. There seemed to be only one exit, and when Ray noticed it, the heavy feeling in her stomach grew even weightier.

"Please relax," someone said through the intercom, "and enjoy the show." Ray suspected the comment was only for audience members.

But then the dream began.

They were in already, shuffling around the room, and Olivia watched from behind a two-way mirror. Most of them were old people, like her friends had told her, hoping to siphon away their wrinkles and regain their health. But then there was a teenager. Standing near the back of the room, managing to look curious and yet utterly miserable at the same time-- Olivia wondered why she had come.

"Who knows what happened to her?" she asked aloud. "How on earth did she get so much freaking money?"

"Olivia!" Grejes barked. "Concentrate."

Olivia closed her eyes obediently and soon all the room's occupants were snoring on the carpet. When she opened them again, she noticed an old guy drooling on someone's silky white dress.

"Gross," she said complacently.

"Concentrate," Grejes repeated, rolling his eyes.

Olivia only sighed, made her way out from behind the two- way mirror, and began her final exam.

It was excruciatingly slow. There were twenty people in the room, and Olivia had to make each one both unique and perfect, at least in the eyes of the audience. When the 'performers' went home, however, they would slowly start to look more like each other, until the effect finally wore off altogether in about five years or so. Then they would have to come back, and according to Grejes, that was what brought in the money.

"Blue eyes, brown hair, white skin," Olivia muttered, picturing the combination in her head, and the salivating old man in front of her began to shift from decrepit to healthy and young. She moved on.

"This one looks nice," she said, finally glancing at a magazine page Grejes had given her 'for a special request'. The page projected itself onto a nearby wall and Olivia cocked her head, thinking. "Isn't black eyes a bit extreme?"

"People like things different," Grejes replied, "and hurry up, or else I'll have to put in an intermission and you'll get lower marks."

"Okay, okay." Gradually, the elderly people in the room became younger and prettier, and the only person left to transfigure was the teenager asleep in the corner. Olivia put more work into her; people had to see more of a difference in the girl, since she was already young and wrinkle- free.

"Silver hair? Purple eyes?" Grejes exclaimed as soon as he saw what she was doing. "Are you nuts?"

"People like things different, and besides, it looks cool," Olivia said defensively.

"Yeah, in a parallel universe," Grejes scoffed. "Oh, whatever. Go on then, wake them up." Grinning, Olivia scrambled back to her perch behind the mirror, and soon the 'performers' were blinking awake and rubbing their eyes sleepily.

"Please exit by the door that has an exit sign," she said cheerfully over the intercom. "You will be given further instructions... later." Then Olivia flopped back in her seat, grinning uncontrollably.

"Don't start celebrating," Grejes reminded her. "It isn't over yet."

"Yeah, spoil the fun," Olivia said.

"You have to make the illusion hold before you're really done."

"Okay, okay..." But inside, she celebrated anyway. Graduation! Finally!

Ray woke up in a different world.

The room around her had been completely changed. The plain red walls she had remembered were now etched in faint, spiraling patterns as delicate as a spider's web, and the shiny silver wall reflected glittering turquoise lights onto her skin. Even the people had been altered-- instead of nineteen relatively ancient humans, they looked about twenty or so, with supermodel- clear skin.

Apparently the other people in the room had also noticed the new developments.

"Ooh!" squealed a bunch of women when they looked at the reflective silver wall. A certain 'young' man and his wife didn't even bother with words-- they just started making out. Ray made a gagging noise behind her hand and shielded her eyes. Even so, she wanted look at herself in the mirror, at least a tiny peek, because there seemed to be the slimmest chance that she might look a little bit better.

"Well, they made you a pretty one," a handsome blonde guy and former old person whistled at her. "Come take a look-see in th'mirror, won'cha?"

"Um... okay," Ray replied, ambling slowly over to the shiny wall and trying not to notice the couple that was still kissing passionately. At the same time, she vaguely observed that her walk wasn't so much of a lumbering sort of thing, but a... what? It was nice, definitely. Just unfamiliar.

The mirror gave her even more of a shock. Ray had been replaced with a taller, thinner, and overall cooler -looking person with strange violet eyes and silver hair. Her nails were no longer ragged from constant nervous biting, and her teeth were eerily, perfectly straight. She ran her tongue along them, trying to get used to the feeling.

"Cool," Ray whispered, and when the girl on the other side of the wall whispered it with her, they both lit up with a huge, exhilarated grin.

But that, she was about to realize, was the high point of her dream.

Grejes was reading the list of applicants.

Up on the stage, there was a screen showing pictures of the applicants before they’d been 'transformed', and one by one, the post- alteration people walked up to the spotlight, all excited and smiling like they'd just won the lottery, because in a way, they had.

"Gerald Birch," Grejes called out, and the man Olivia had recognized as 'the drooling one' bounded up to Grejes. The audience applauded politely, but they probably weren't amazed yet-- she hadn't exactly done her best work on Gerald.

"Carmen Borsht... Brennan Durham.... Katherine Higgs..." The list seemed to go on and on as each applicant ran up to the stage and received a handshake and applause. But Olivia could only stare into space. Now her test was the test of time-- how well would the applicants hold their illusions? Would they hold them at all?

"Raylena Zaden."

"Raylena Zaden."

The voice echoed through the nearly empty room and soon found its way into her head. It caught her when her eyes were closed, at her most vulnerable, at precisely the wrong time, and soon the memories were flooding back into her head: little Lena when she looked into the mirror and for the first time thought that she didn't look quite right; an older Ray as she got up for school every day and had to live with that fact every time one of her could-have-been friends glared at her through discriminating eyes; her parents always working for her, quietly trying to give everything to their hopeless only child; and the pain, the lurking pain that always said in the dark of the night when she was lying awake, why don't I belong why don't I fit in what's wrong with me why can't I be happy with what I've got what's wrong what's wrong what's wrong...

Ray's eyes snapped open just in time to register the fact that her strange new face was churning and blurring into something heartbreakingly familiar, but it wasn't what she saw in the mirror, it was what she thought of herself deep inside. And it was hideous.

"No no no no!" Olivia shrieked, a hot ache in her throat. The teenage girl wasn't holding her illusion. She was mutating somehow, a terrifying caricature of what she had been before. You see what you want to see. It was Grejes' motto, and he quoted it day in and day out. But it wasn't true-- you see what you think you should see sounded more accurate. And right now, Raylena Zaden obviously thought she wasn't good enough to look like Olivia's illusion.

"No," Olivia said half- heartedly. She slumped over to the secret door in the mirror and then pushed it open slowly. "No, please, I'm begging you to please, please turn back, it's my life you've got in your hands, because I don't know, Grejes is going to kill me if I leave you like this, but I have no idea how to fix you if you won't do it the first time..."

The girl stared at Olivia through wide, emotionless black eyes.

"What d'you want?" she asked in a voice much higher than normal.

"I don't know!" Olivia shouted in frustration.

"How long does this take to wear off? Because I know it does."

Olivia avoided looking at the creepy, misshapen face as she replied, "About five years, usually, but I'm not sure about you."

"Not sure?"

"No. It might be like that forever."

What had gone wrong? Out of the thousands of people who went through this procedure every day, why did Ray have to be the one that messed up?

"It's not your fault," she had assured the girl who had been hiding behind the silver wall. Then she ran out of the building.

Ray ran fast, too, because as long as she lied to herself she could imagine that she was anything at all. But the disgusted expressions on many of the pedestrians' faces reminded her constantly of how repulsive she looked. How repulsive she had made herself. She needed to go away, far away to the countryside where no one would think to look for her or at her-- somewhere in which she could lose herself and lose this terrible memory.

As the sun set she came upon an abandoned house at the edge of the suburbs, covered in dust but with a reasonably soft bed. Then Ray turned in for the night, after realizing that she was completely, thoroughly alone. The nearest neighbor was at least five miles away.

And strangely, for the first time, it felt good.

After announcing Olivia Fennwick a failure, Grejes sent her back home to her family, whom she hadn't seen in at least three years, and they were all overjoyed-- even Grejes, though he never openly admitted it. Olivia prized herself on living a fun, 'normal' life, but every so often a UFO was said to appear in the Fennwicks' back yard, or a penguin in the refrigerator.

But even with her newly restored family and social life, there was one thing that still haunted Olivia every night. What had happened to Raylena Zaden? The memory of Raylena's disturbing face always appeared in the air when Olivia thought about her, and Olivia had to block the image out tightly unless she wanted the horrendous thing to materialize. Yet she thought about Raylena anyway, because it was such a nagging unanswered question, and because it had been her one fault.

Five days in the forest-- five days that she would never forget. No one to talk to besides the birds and the squirrels; nothing to listen to except the wind and the crickets; nothing to worry about except where to get the next meal. And here, she could finally think clearly. Because here in the forest, she didn't look like anything. She didn't have to.

Until the day she came upon a river.

It was a small river, barely larger than a puddle, but it had water. And after looking at its rippling brown surface, she concluded that she was very, very thirsty. But when she knelt down to drink, she noticed there was already something there. She peered closer. The thing looked familiar-- had it been hers?

The buried and suppressed thoughts burst into her mind like a volcano and she reeled back, stunned by the force of it, the magnitude of the memories she had forced underneath the thick, forgiving carpet that was her mind: her parents hugging her close when she'd been little; laughing freely into the wind; the early days when she had been Raylena Zaden, and wanted to be; and finally a small imprint of a feeling-- joy, or love, maybe, that she had felt after a long day of satisfying work. Her shout startled a nearby bird, which chirped indignantly, but she couldn't see; the tears were falling thick and fast into the tiny river.
Life. She knew it again. She knew how to be alive, how to live, and it didn't include the opinion of the popular girls at school; it never had. And when the tears had stopped, and the river cleared again, she looked into the water and saw the reflection: puffy eyes, swollen nose, tear- streaked face, messy hair… the whole after- crying thing.

Ray grinned. She didn't need to be transformed. Her own face was good enough.