Mars – because she's sworn off her past life, sworn off her first name – grows up surrounded by pristine white shirts and polished banisters. Her bed is wide and wrapped in plush, comfortable silk. The windows of her bedroom are high, curling inches before the ceiling in white spirals, and the pink curtains are as pale as the skin of her cheeks when the sun glimpses inside. The floor of her personal bathroom is marble, white and sturdy, matching both the sink and the bathtub; her towels feel like soft patches of clouds, her childish and soft-smelling perfumes are tidily compressed in the corner of her vanity, and Mars feels like this is suffocating, but she doesn't quite know why until she's older.
She goes to a boarding school when she is six, because it's tradition and because she needs to have a proper education. It seems like a good decision until Mars is thirteen, fourteen, and boys from other schools learn about the existence of a hole in the fence surrounding the expensive building.
She dates three boys, refuses six, and feels nothing for all nine of them.
On the trip back home, she walks into a college student with hard, dull blue eyes. She apologizes, feeling warm, and self-consciously runs a hand across her red hair, hoping to calm it down. He collects his barely-lost bearings, gives her an uninterested glance, and sits four seats away from her group of friends.
Mars sits next to him, wearing a smile that looks as flirty as it does apologetic—
"Would you like to change the world?"
—and then ends up never going home at all.