When the week began Amber's hair was a shade of red that couldn't come naturally, and so thick that it took ages to brush it. Her nose was long and narrow, and there was a beauty mark just above her collar bone and a tattoo of a ladybug just below her ear that Pavi tutted at and informed her was much too cliche. She dressed in lace and gauze and filmy little bits of nothing that barely qualified as more than lingerie and felt like a fairy princess.

Mid-week, sick of struggling against tangles, her hair was flat black and shaved to stubble, carefully cultivated so it grew evenly all over, nowhere left patchy or overly bare. Before they attached the new scalp, her skull was cracked open in a half dozen places and the pieces shifted, reshaped, until it was aesthetically perfect for a girl who felt like walking around nearly bald. The eyes she'd been using were popped out and carefully sealed up so they could be sold for charity--'Fresh out of Amber Sweet's head, ladies and gentlemen! See life through the eyes of the world's richest woman!' they would bring in thousands--and replaced with ones as green as a new leaf, that stood out starkly in her open face. She wore blaringly bright make-up and tight leather, her whip never leaving her side, and knew that she was the type of girl that nobody would mess with.

Saturday was her father's birthday, and as a gift for one day only she tossed the SurGENs pictures of the face she'd been born with and went back to being Carmela Largo. Her family was written all over her features in a way she'd never been able to stand; her mother's boring dirt-brown hair, her father's dark eyes, Luigi's gaunt cheeks and the thin lips Pavi had once had before he started stealing full ones off of women's faces. It was an awful face for a girl, although back before her daddy had agreed to allow her first surgery people had always tried to feed her bullshit about how it had 'character' like she should be happy with that if she couldn't be pretty.

She hunted down one of the pretty, frilly, way too prudish little girl dresses her daddy had always provided her with before she decided that she'd pick her own style along with her face and name, and felt like nothing at all.

Luigi was the only one who even had the decency to react to her real face the way it deserved; when she walked into the dining room for breakfast, he laughed out loud to see her.