“You have a woman’s waist,” she observed, as she brushed her palm down my side to demonstrate how my body curved in below my rib cage and then back out toward my hips. I smiled into the mirror at my cousin’s compliment and felt an echo of that pleasure with Lucy.

“Your hands are so dainty and small!” my friend marveled as she held one and slipped a gold bangle through my fingers. I looked down and noticed that my hand was indeed smaller than Lucy’s, though that was only because I was Asian. My hands weren’t particularly small by Filipino standards, but people judged my body differently in America, especially someone like Lucy, who didn’t know I was albino.

We sat on the bed as Lucy applied gray eyeshadow to my lids with a tiny, padded brush, then used a stick whose end reminded me of a spider’s legs to rub the tops and bottoms of my nearly white lashes with mascara, a cosmetic item I hadn’t known existed until that moment. She ordered me not to blink even though my eyes started to water, and I felt the heavy thickness of the substance when she was done. Lucy complimented what she called my “cupid’s bow” before she uncapped a black tube of bloodred lipstick and rubbed it against my lips. She stood up and looked under piles of papers on her desk until she found a gold-and-black hair ornament she called a barrette and affixed it to my short hair right above my forehead.

“You’re almost ready,” she said. “We just need some pumps.”

Lucy gave me a pair of narrow black shoes made of plastic that was as shiny as the velvet of my dress was matte, with heels that tapered at the bottom, a couple of inches high. When I stood up after I put them on, pleased that they fit, I also found that I didn’t have as much trouble walking in them as I expected. Lucy led me back to her common room, where she opened a closet door. With a flourish of her hands, she motioned me toward the mirror on the other side. When I ambled over, I realized I was looking down because I was afraid to fall, so I tilted my head upward to see myself.

“Not bad,” I said. I didn’t look nearly as ridiculous as I expected.

“Come on, you look great!” Lucy countered, and I smiled to please her, grateful she took so much effort to get me ready.