Unretouched
Part One: Sophie
My daughter, Sophie, is eight years old and she is the most beautiful person I have ever seen.
I know all mothers say that. I don’t care. It’s true.
She has curly black hair that refuses to stay in a ponytail. She has large brown eyes with eyelashes so long that strangers comment on them at the grocery store. She has a gap between her front teeth that hisses when she pronounces words with « years » in them.
And she has vitiligo.
If you don’t know what vitiligo is, neither did I until Sophie was four years old.
It’s a skin condition. The cells that produce pigment in the skin stop working in certain areas. No one knows exactly why. It’s not contagious. It doesn’t hurt. It’s not dangerous.
But it leaves white patches on the skin. Smooth, pale, irregular shapes, like milk spilled on a dark table.
The first patch appeared on Sophie’s left hand when she was four years old.
A small white spot on the back of his finger, about the size of a pea. I thought it was paint. I tried washing it in the bathtub.
It didn’t wash off.
At five o’clock, there was another one on his elbow. At six o’clock, a mark around his right eye looked a bit like a butterfly. At seven, there were marks on his knees, his neck, the back of his other hand, and a white streak on his eyebrow.
Our dermatologist at Vanderbilt, Dr. Okafor, sat with me in a small examination room and explained it gently.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s not something you did or didn’t do. It’s genetic, in part. It often happens in families.”
“No one in our family has it,” I said.
Doctor. Okafor nodded slowly. “That’s what you know,” she said.
I didn’t pay attention to it at the time.
My name is Heather Brooks. I am thirty-six years old.
I’m a second-grade teacher in Franklin, Tennessee, just south of Nashville. My husband, Jason, is a physical therapist. We have one child. We live in a small brick house with a large yard and an old swing set that Jason built from a kit.
We spend a lot of time teaching Sophie to love herself.
Part Two: The Playground
Children can be cruel. I have been a teacher for thirteen years. I know this better than anyone.
But knowing it and seeing it happen to your own child are two very different things.
It started in first year.
A boy named Carson pointed at the patch around Sophie’s eye during recess. He said she looked like a cow. The other children laughed. One of them started mooing.
Sophie came home and locked herself in the bathroom. I found her sitting on the floor with a washcloth, rubbing her face so hard it was red and raw.
“I want him to leave,” she sobbed. “Mommy, make him leave.”
I sat on the bathroom floor with her for an hour.
I held her face in my hands. I kissed each white spot. The one near her eye. The one on her eyebrow. The one on her chin.
“They are yours,” I told her. “They are part of you. And everything that is part of you is beautiful.”
She didn’t believe me. Not that night.
In the second year, the situation worsened.
A girl named Kennedy refused to hold Sophie’s hand during a game of Red Rover. She said she didn’t want to catch it. The teacher had to explain to the whole class that vitiligo wasn’t contagious.
Sophie told me later that the explanation was worse than the original. Because now everyone knows. Everyone was watching.
Jason and I did everything we could think of.
We found a consultant who specializes in children with visible differences. We bought him books with characters who looked different. We found a doll online with vitiligo patches, made by a company in Canada. Sophie named it Patches. She sleeps with it every night.
We found a Facebook group for parents of children with vitiligo. We found a model named Winnie Harlow, who has vitiligo and has been on magazine covers all over the world. We printed out a picture of her and put it on the refrigerator.
Little by little, it improved.
In third grade, Sophie stopped wearing long sleeves in September. She stopped covering her face with her hair. When a new child asked her questions about her skin, she would reply, “It’s called vitiligo. It’s like a map. Do you want to see where Canada is?”
She pointed to a patch on her forearm that, if you squinted, was shaped a bit like Canada.
The new kid usually laughed. And then they generally became friends.
I was so proud of her that I could barely breathe.
I never would have imagined that after all that, she would face the same cruelty from her own aunt.
Part Three: Amanda
My younger sister is Amanda. She is twenty-nine years old. Seven years younger than me.
Growing up in Murfreesboro, I was the one who took care of her. Both our parents worked long hours. Our father drove a truck for a freight company. Our mother worked as a cashier at a Kroger.
I prepared Amanda’s breakfast. I walked her to school. I braided her hair every morning. I sat with her when she had nightmares.
She followed me everywhere like a puppy.
When she was nine years old, something happened.
I was sixteen years old. I had just gotten my driver’s license. I remember it because I drove her myself to the dermatologist, in my mom’s old Corolla, because my mom couldn’t leave work.
There was a spot on the back of Amanda’s right hand. White. Smooth. About the size of a quarter.
The dermatologist said it was vitiligo.
Amanda cried in the car all the way home. I bought her a milkshake at Sonic’s and let her choose the music.
When we got home, Mom glanced at the patch and her face tightened.
My mother, Brenda, is a good woman. I want to make that clear. She worked hard all her life and loved us as best she could.
But my mother was raised by a woman who believed that appearances were paramount. Grandma Pearl ironed her dishcloths and wore lipstick to take out the trash. She told us that a lady never let anyone see her flaws.
Mom learned that from her. And she taught it to Amanda.
“We’ll cover it up,” Mom said that evening, looking at the patch on Amanda’s hand. “No one needs to know.”
She bought Amanda a tube of concealer at Walgreens on Memorial Boulevard. She showed her how to dab it on, how to blend it with her fingertip, and how to set it with powder.
Amanda was nine years old.
She wore makeup on her hands every day after that.
When more patches arrived, she covered them too. One on the other side. One on her wrist. One on her neck, just below her jaw.
In high school, she completely stopped wearing short sleeves. She wore long sleeves even in July. She refused to go swimming. She wore gloves to her prom.
I tried to tell him that it didn’t matter.
I told her she was beautiful. I told her that patches weren’t something to be ashamed of.
But I was seventeen, then eighteen, then nineteen, and I went to university in Knoxville. And Mom was there every morning, with the proofreader, telling him to cover up.
When Amanda was in her twenties, I had almost forgotten.
She was so good at hiding it. She had perfected her makeup. She wore long sleeves and high necklines. She had built an entire wardrobe around her skin.
She was the social media manager for a chic boutique in Nashville. She had twelve thousand followers on Instagram. Every photo was perfect. Every angle chosen. Every photo edited.
She has never posted a single picture of her hands.
Part Four: The Wedding
Amanda got engaged last October.
His name is Ryan Callahan. He is thirty-one years old. He is a history teacher at Brentwood High School. He is calm, kind, and funny, and he looks at my sister as if she had hung from the moon.
I loved him the first time I met him.
The wedding was planned for June. In a small white Methodist church in Leiper’s Fork, a small town outside Franklin with a main street, a general store, and fields filled with horses.
Amanda had planned every detail. She had spent a year on it.
She had hired a photographer from Nashville. A famous one, apparently. Someone who had photographed weddings for country music stars. Four thousand dollars for eight hours.
Sophie was delighted.
She had never been to a wedding before. She talked about it for months. What would the cake be like? Would there be dancing? Would Aunt Amanda look like a princess?
She asked if she could be a bridesmaid. Amanda said she already had one, Ryan’s little niece. Sophie was disappointed but said okay.
In May, Sophie and I went shopping in a small boutique in downtown Franklin.
She tried on six dresses. She chose a pink one. Pale pink, with short puffed sleeves and a full skirt that twirled when she turned. There were small white flowers embroidered around the hem.
She turned in front of the mirror for ten minutes.
“Mom,” she said. “Do you think Aunt Amanda will like it?”
“I think she’s going to love it,” I said.
The dress had short sleeves.
Sophie’s arms were visible. Every patch. The one shaped like Canada on her forearm. The ones on her elbows. The one on the back of each hand.
She didn’t even think about it. She just loved the dress.
That’s how far she would have gone.
Part Five: The Phone Call
One week before the wedding, Amanda called me.
It was a Sunday evening. I was in the kitchen preparing spaghetti. Sophie was in the living room watching a movie with Jason.
I answered on speakerphone.
“Hey, Amanda! Are you getting nervous?”
She didn’t answer my question.
“Listen,” she said. “I need you to come alone. Don’t bring Sophie.”
I stopped stirring the sauce.
“What?” I said. “Why?”
She sighed. A long, impatient sigh, as if I had asked something stupid.
“We spend thousands of dollars on photography, Heather,” she said. “Four thousand dollars. In one day.”
“I know,” I said. “So?”
“Her skin condition will therefore attract attention,” Amanda said. “It will ruin the aesthetics.”
I turned off the burner.
“Aesthetics,” I repeated.
“I planned every detail of these photos,” Amanda said. “The colors. The lighting. The flowers. Everything is soft, neutral, and perfect. And Sophie’s skin is going to stand out in every group photo.”
She paused.
“Please don’t make this difficult,” she said.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
I took the phone off the speakerphone. I went out the back door onto the porch so Sophie wouldn’t hear.
“Amanda,” I said. “Are you ashamed of your own niece?”
“I’m not ashamed,” Amanda said. “I’m realistic. People are going to look at my wedding photos for the rest of my life. My children are going to look at them. I don’t want everyone—”
She stopped.
“To what?” I said.
“Stop being so dramatic!” Amanda snapped. “It’s my wedding! I have the right to have the photos I want!”
I hung up.
I stood on the back porch, trembling. My hands were shaking so badly that I almost dropped the phone.
Through the kitchen window, I could see Sophie in the living room. She was curled up on the sofa next to Jason, watching Moana. Her arm was thrown over the back of the sofa. Canada was showing.
She was laughing at something on the screen.
Part Six: The Idea
At first, I decided not to go at all.
How could I celebrate someone who treated my daughter like that? How could I sit in a church pew and smile at my sister after she called my child a problem for her pictures?
I told Jason that evening, after Sophie had gone to bed.
He remained silent for a long time.
“She said to ruin the aesthetics,” he said.
“Those were exactly his words.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“What are you going to tell Sophie?” he asked.
That’s what kept me awake.
Sophie had been talking about this wedding for months. She had chosen her dress. She had practiced dancing in the living room. She had made a card for Aunt Amanda with glitter and stickers that said Congratulations! in purple marker, with three t’s inside.
How do you tell an eight-year-old girl that she is not invited to her aunt’s wedding because of her skin color?
I stayed awake until two in the morning.
And around 3 p.m., looking at the ceiling, I thought of a nine-year-old girl in the back seat of my mom’s old Corolla.
Crying because of a Sonic milkshake. With a white stain on the back of his right hand.
And then an idea came to me.
Amanda wanted perfect wedding photos?
GOOD.
I would make sure that nothing spoiled her precious photos.
Part Seven: The Box
I spent the next five days preparing.
I didn’t tell anyone what I was planning. Not my mother. Not my friends. Not even Jason.
He asked me once, on Wednesday night, when he found me at the kitchen table at midnight with a pile of old photo albums.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m giving a wedding gift,” I said.
He looked at the albums. He looked at me.
“Heather,” he said cautiously. “Are you about to do something you’ll regret?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I hope not.”
The albums came from Mom’s house. I had gone to Murfreesboro on Tuesday afternoon after school. I had told Mom I wanted to look at some old photos before the wedding. To do something nice for Amanda.
Mom had taken out all the albums she had. Thirty years’ worth of family photos. Christmas mornings. Birthday parties. School photos. Beach holidays at Gulf Shores.
I went through each of them.
I was looking for pictures of Amanda.
Not the photos taken after she turned nine. Not the ones with long sleeves, gloves, and careful angles.
Those from before.
I found them.
Four-year-old Amanda, in a red swimsuit, running through a sprinkler in our garden. She was laughing so hard that her eyes were closed.
Amanda at six years old, in her Easter dress, holding a basket of eggs. Her hands were bare.
Eight-year-old Amanda, wearing a tank top at a July 4th picnic. Holding a sparkler. Bare arms. Bare hands.
And then I found the ones I really needed.
Amanda at nine years old. After the dermatologist. A photo from the fall, at the county fair. She was holding cotton candy. You could clearly see the white spot on her hand, before she learned to cover it.
She was smiling. A real smile.
Amanda, ten years old, at her birthday party. In a T-shirt. Blowing out candles. You could see the patches on both hands. And one on her wrist.
She was laughing.
There were only a few. Mom had to stop taking them. Or throw them away.
But there were enough of them.
I took them to a printing shop in Franklin.
I had them enlarged. Cleaned. Restored. The old ones were faded and scratched. The man at the printing shop carefully repaired them. He didn’t edit anything. I told him not to.
“Don’t touch the skin,” I said. “Leave everything exactly as it is.”
He looked at the photos. He looked at me. He nodded.
I bought a white leather photo album. The nice kind. With gold lettering on the front.
I had the cover engraved.
I put the photos inside. One on each page. In order. Amanda at four, six, eight, nine, ten.
And at the very end, I added an extra photo.
It was a photo I had taken myself, two weeks earlier. On my phone, in our garden.
Sophie. In her pink wedding dress, twirling on the grass. Her skirt billowed around her. Her arms spread wide. Every stain visible in the sunlight.
She was laughing so hard that her eyes were closed.
Exactly like her aunt at four years old, running through the sprinkler.
Then I wrote a letter.
It took me three days. I wrote it eleven times. I’m a second-grade teacher. I spend my days helping seven-year-olds express their feelings with words. I couldn’t express my own with words.
On the eleventh try, I succeeded.