To Live Again, For the First Time!

Grace started making small talk as she cleaned off Emilin's face to lay some foundations for the next few hours of work.

She was actually slightly surprised that Emilin was wearing zero makeup, not even having any creamer or foundation on her face.

Thankfully, all hope was not lost as Grace noted that Emilin was at least using some sunscreen, or else she may have really cried from despair.

From this close distance, Grace found that this newbie was actually prettier than she had thought. Her eyesight was perfectly fine, but she didn't know why she hadn't noticed Emilin's unblemished face and soft features previously.

In the end, Grace could only brush it off as having met someone who was prettier the more you stared at them, which wasn't completely uncommon.

As for Emilin, she simply obediently sat and listened to Grace talk.

It had all started with one simple question from herself and suddenly, Emilin was awarded a long background story, an autobiography if you will, of Grace.

"When did you start doing makeup?" Emilin asked after a short bit of silence.

From the mirror, Emilin could see Grace's signature playful smirk.

"Now that's an interesting story."

She was idle enough and moving her mouth didn't affect her hands that were doing the magic.

"Well, I have no problem admitting that my… strong personality is the main perpetrator for the whole mess, but I guess it ended up being a good thing since I found my passion."

Grace seemed excited to be able to talk about the gossip of her life to someone else, not to mention she was also talking about something she was passionate about at the same time.

She was quite shameless about the whole thing too.

"Well, let's just say that my rebellious age came quite early."

"And so, as any other rebellious child would do, I dyed my hair, pierced my ears, just short of getting tattoos if they were not illegal for children of my age. All without my parent's knowledge or consent of course."

"But to be fair, it was mainly because of peer pressure."

Seeing Emilin's confused gaze, as if asking what was wrong with what she had done, Grace shrugged thinking back to her dark past.

"Well, my family is rather conservative, at least on the surface."

'Conservative, but only on the surface?' Emilin found the wording somewhat troublesome. What good is there to pretend to be conservative in this day and age?

But in the end, what else could she do but nod and pretend she had understood.

She wasn't one to voice out her judgments.

It was impossible to say that she simply wouldn't judge others, after all, that's all human beings did, but at least she wasn't nosy or unrestrained enough to act on her unfound judgments.

Grace laughed before she continued, thinking of how silly the situation was back then.

"My brother is 3 years older than me, but we have our birthdays just a day apart in the calendar. We celebrate our birthday together due to convenience and many times past midnight so that we could do it properly."

"When it comes to celebrations, our family invites all of their friends, family, business partners, friends and family of those business partners, and some other relevant people. The idea is that it's a big deal, a big event."

Grace laughed again, this time more unrestrained.

"So imagine their shock and horror when they saw my appearance just the day before the big party."

"It would have been fine if I dyed my hair brown or another natural shade that wouldn't be too obvious or eye-catching, but I just had to go dye it all purple and pink as if I were joining some My Little Pony convention the next day."

"Well, the end of the story is that they flipped and my brother laughed his ass off mocking me."

Grace's face turned dark for a split second when she mentioned her brother, who had always been a pain in her ass, before returning to her usual carefree expression.

But this didn't go unnoticed by Emilin, who had been watching her from the mirror this whole time.

'Do the siblings have some kind of deep-seated grudge against each other?' Emilin inwardly pondered.

Someone like Emilin, who had always received and given the greatest love and care to and from her family including her two siblings wouldn't understand the simple notion that that was simply how normal siblings interacted with each other.

It was absolutely normal, she was the outlier.

Grace didn't give Emilin any more time to think about it as she continued her self-deprecating story, though, in retrospect, it seemed like she had already overcome the shames of her past, being able to even laugh at them as if they were the anecdotes of someone other than herself.

"In the end, well, my parents threw me out the day before my birthday, into the streets asking me to figure it out myself. It was true love I tell you, true love, you show a child you picked up from the dumpsters! (T_T)"

Grace shouted mournfully.

"It wasn't even completed my fault since they said I could choose to do whatever I liked for my birthday and so I wanted to give them a surprise too!~"

"But I guess joining the Equestria Girls wasn't part of their acceptable range underneath the umbrella that encompassed 'Everything.'"

Grace sighed ruefully as if she had been greatly wronged, to which Emilin claimed to have no comment on.

"Well, since I was young, I have always been able to get away with a lot of things."

"To put it nicely, I was born with a golden spoon hanging from my mouth, to put it bluntly, I was spoiled rotten."

Grace said casually, so casually in fact that Emilin almost doubted that this was coming from someone who claimed to have been incredibly irresponsibly spoiled just a time prior.

Till now Emilin still didn't know which birthday Grace was talking about, so even if she knew that Grace was 16, she didn't know if this was something preteen, or something that occurred just this year, both of which she heavily doubted.

The preteen speculation was somewhat absurd if she really went and dyed her hair without other adult's knowledge, no matter how early her rebelling phase occurred.

And seeing as Grace acted as if this was something of the distant past, in addition to the fact that she had a relatively early rebellion according to Grace's own standards, it was probably not something that happened just this year, not to mention Emilin heavily doubted that her skills were something that could be cultivated in just a year. 

Admittance is hard.

After all, mindsets and perspectives were some of the hardest things to change, especially when cultivated a certain way since young.

"I didn't know then, but I'm sure there were bodyguards protecting me all the way, so I was fine. My parents aren't actually that irresponsible. My brother just used his dirty little tricks to convince them that I needed to suffer a little this time."

Grace finished wiping Emilin's face clean after applying a specialized cleaner that would remove all the dust and dirt particles accumulated on one's face before continuing.

"To be fair, I probably deserved that."

Grace's weary smile disappeared in an instant with a shake of her head as she reluctantly admitted to her past faults.

"Anyways, things happened and my short legs took me to the hairdresser that I had been at just the previous day, and the employees there recognized me in an instant, after all, it's hard not to remember a little girl with a mop of purple hair with pink highlights, right?"

Emilin thought about it for a second and nodded in agreement, which Grace ignored for her dignity's sake.

Her dignity would be very proud of her...

It was okay if she said it, but it really hit people's egos hard when others agreed.

"Anyways, I was ready to give in, to sacrifice it all! To dye my hair back to its original color..."

Grace's dramatic flare earned her a chuckle from Emilin.

"And that was when the life-changing moment occurred."

"The kind sisters, who seemed to have expected my return, spoke to me and introduced me to the wig, and the other kind sister who was doing her hair that day introduced me to the makeup."

Listening to this story and observing Grace's mystified face as well as considering her age, Emilin couldn't help but suspect that those people may or may not have wanted to trick the young girl at the time, especially with the keywords 'purple and pink' + 'who seemed to have expected my return', though it was mere speculation with absolutely no evidence.

She was probably just jumping the gun, right?

Grace proceeded to tell her happily ever after story.

She got back home with a fix and the next day, her birthday, everyone complimented her exemplary this and that.

The key point was finally reached after all that fluff.

"The conclusion was that I felt an instant connection to that feeling."

"Well, and I just felt like I could be someone completely different with and without makeup on. I don't believe that the magic lies in the change in appearance, but more in the change of heart, the change in confidence."

"As for my parents, they couldn't be happier that I had finally gotten somewhere I could put all my excess energy into."

Grace smiled melancholically, just as she had when she complained about how her parents treated her as if she were a daughter picked up from the dumps.

With the addition of tear-filled eyes and dramatic sniffs.