The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

There was no part of her beauty that didn’t make me question mine.

I had already known the answer: it was the same every year. I only asked out of my old habit of prompting people to explain things to me even when I knew the answer. When I was a child, I found that it would make people more likely to want to help me, and it served me just as well as an adult.

I thought that we had lost some crucial bit of power, not from the act of being judged, but by showing that it meant something to us.