A/N: I have a lot of feelings about season one Lydia.

You don't know when it starts happening, but one day you look into the mirror and suddenly you don't recognise the girl staring back at you.

You console yourself by thinking lip-gloss smears and beauty queen tears don't mean a thing to the rest of the world anyways, even if the rest of the world was privy to this treasured information, which it's not, which it won't ever be, which is no one's fault but your own.

High school to you means high heels and high grades, but that's fine, you're fine, you're going to change the world without losing your youth. Hair curlers and crimped skirts dominate your spare time and every time you walk past your stuffed-to-the-brim bookshelf you imagine that a piece of you dies. Your lashes are almost as long as the list of things you know you're going to accomplish one day, as soon as you get through this, as soon as you walk through the doors of your chosen hell with a diploma in your hand and eyeliner on your lids.

They all said it was one or the other, after all: beauty or brains; so you might as well be both. You've got the potential, you've got the willpower, you've got the strength, until suddenly you don't.

The girl in the mirror has bags under her eyes (nothing the right concealer can't hide) and a tremble to her lips (press them together and purse them out shining red, red, red) and a shine to her eyes. (this, nothing can fix.)

(So you think.)

You're always on the edge; the edge of joy or despair, genius or flirt, cracked or whole. You wonder if you're nothing but a perfectly assembled jigsaw puzzle, coming slowly apart, and then things change again. You're drowning, drowning, drowning (in blood, maybe, or perhaps in your tears,) and then you're not.

Things have to get worse before they can get better.

And when you're done pretending to be a nitwit, says the boy you're only talking to for Allison (lovely and strong and shining brighter than you think you ever will) and you listen to him for the first time maybe ever, you'll eventually go off and write some insane mathematical theorem that wins you the Nobel Prize.

Well.

Field's medal, you reply, and for the first time in far too long the makeup on your face feels less like chains and more like the war paint that it used to be.