By Nicole D. Sconiers
Ever since she was a quirky 13-year-old rocking sparkly headbands and hot pink velour sweatsuits, Tisa’s had problem skin. My bestie spends major coins on the latest potions to fade her dark spots, but this time she went too far.
I first noticed how pale she was a few months ago. It was July and we were on our way down the shore to catch some rays. I’m the color of soaked almonds. Tisa’s a shade lighter, like the cap of a baby bella mushroom. She was covered up with a floppy hat, long-sleeved shirt and flowy skirt. Fuchsia cornrows peeked out beneath her hat.
“What’s up with all the layers?” I asked when she got in the car.
Tisa shrugged. “I don’t want to burn.”
Something was bugging her. She wasn’t even down to take our usual Thelma & Louise going on a road-trip selfie.
When I saw Tisa a month later, she looked like a different person. Not a pimple or scar in sight. But the rich baby bella coloring had a soulless sheen.
Memory on a Hill by H. Lee Messina
She came over for movie night and Moscato. I tried to find a decent flick. I have my own version of the Bechdel test. The film’s gotta feature at least two Black people who talk to each other about more than oppression. We finally settled on hood horror.
I turned to Tisa to announce that the deejay was the killer. For an instant, I looked right through the side of her face.
I blinked. Then her face was solid again. Had to be the wine. Giving me double vision. But I knew something wasn’t right.
After Tisa left, I swiped through her IG on my phone. Looking for clues. One of her top followers was Dream_Makr, a cosmetics company. The owner was a beautiful Black lady with sculpted brows. Her skin was an unnatural grayish-brown color, like ground beef going bad. She held an elegant pink bottle aloft. Dream Maker fade cream.
I clicked a link in her bio, which took me to her website. For only $150, you too could fade dark spots. The testimonials page featured a gallery of Black women with that same spoiled meat coloring. I clicked out of her site in disgust.
I know a few women who bleach. There’s an unsmiling lady who’s been riding my bus since I started driving for the borough a decade ago, and I swear her skin gets lighter every year. I’d never ask the lady if she bleaches. That’s akin to asking if her hair is real. Besides, I didn’t care about that passenger, but I cared about Tisa. I decided to mention Dream Maker the next time we hung out.
Weeks would pass before I saw Tisa again.
Every time I texted to ask if she wanted to get together, she gave some excuse. Caught a cold. On the way to hang out with her coworkers at the bakery. Tisa only has a few good friends. Same as me. It’s hard finding your tribe as a quirky Black girl living in a small town.
I’m not big on Facetime but I broke down and made the call because I missed my girl. As soon as Tisa picked up, she turned her camera off.
“What’s going on, Sis?” I asked.
“Nothing.” Her voice seemed to be coming from far away.
“I miss you.”
I spoke to her profile picture, a selfie of Tisa on a beach. She wore an off-shoulder maxi dress. Her tan lines were visible. Tisa went to Cancun alone for her 30th birthday. I offered to come with. I didn’t like the idea of her celebrating a milestone bday solo, but bestie said she wanted to do something adventurous.
“I miss you too.”
“Turn your camera on.”
“Nope. I look a mess.”
“It feels like you’re hiding from me, Tisa.”
It felt weird arguing with a pic of my brown-skinned bestie with the ocean at her back when my real friend was probably holed up in her apartment, wasting away.
Fading away.
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“I don’t think that cream is good for you.” I blurted it out, surprising myself and Tisa. I could tell by her silence. “I know you’re bleaching.”
She finally spoke. “I’m fading my imperfections.”
“You were perfect before.”
Tisa snorted. “Stop lying, Gloria. My skin was jacked up.”
“Your skin is flawless now, but it doesn’t look healthy.”
“I thought we didn’t judge other women’s bodies.”
Tisa knew that was a damn lie. We spent hours on gossip sites, ki-ki’ing at celebs with botched BBLs and overfilled lips. Now she was in her kumbaya bag just because she was transforming into one of those baddies in search of eternal perfection, no matter the cost.
“Sis, you see all these girls on IG, slathering on bronzer, Blackfishing to the gods, and you out here erasing your melanin?” I said.
“So? You’re too lazy to work on your flaws.”
“I’m happy being me.”
“No, you settled for being you.”
Before I could reply, she ended the call.
After our little tiff, Tisa blocked me on social. I had to lurk to keep up with her.
Her comments struck a nerve: “You settled for being you.” She was right. I knew the struggle to love your body. When I was a kid, I got teased for having a big nose. If I were a character in a book, they’d probably describe me as “just shy of being pretty” or having “strong, African features,” as if being pretty makes you more relatable and African features are something to tone down or mask.
I revisited the bleaching lady’s website to check out the ingredients in Dream Maker. The main one listed was hydroquinone. My grandmother used fade creams containing hydroquinone back in the day. I knew long-term use caused all kinds of kidney and liver ailments and reduced skin thickness.
I had to warn Tisa. The one place she hadn’t blocked me was on her phone. I needed to act fast before she lost more of herself.
When my shift ended the following night, I drove to Tisa’s house. Carved pumpkins grinned from her neighbors’ porches. Orange string lights blinked inside their homes. Tisa’s house was dark. I texted her earlier: Hey, I know you’re mad. I just wanna make sure you’re eating. DoorDash is on the way.
A few minutes before the DoorDash driver arrived, I snuck up the walkway and hid behind Tisa’s steps. I heard the rustling of a paper bag as the Dasher placed her dinner on the steps, then heavy footfalls as he left. A few seconds passed. The deadbolt disengaged. Before the screen door opened, I raced out from my hiding place and grabbed the bag.
Tisa poked her head out the door. She wore a black hoodie and a facial mask that covered everything but her eyes. It looked like I had interrupted a robbery in progress. She tried to quickly shut the screen door, but I shoved my arm through the crack. Tisa backed up. Resigned. I barged inside, carrying her dinner.
“What are you doing here, Gloria?”
“Checking on you.”
“I told you, I’m fine.”
I brushed past Tisa, turning on the lights. The house was quiet. She usually blasted FKA Twigs or Björk or some electronica artists I couldn’t get into. Her house smelled musty, like she hadn’t opened the windows in a while.
I carried her dinner into the kitchen and fixed her plate. Chicken enchiladas and tortilla soup. Then I brought the meal to Tisa, who had plopped down at the dining room table. A braid escaped her hoodie. Frizzy and lint-caked.
She stared at the food but didn’t remove her mask.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I told you that cream was making you sick, Tisa.” I slid into the chair next to her. “Please tell me why you’re avoiding me.”
Tisa was silent for a few moments. Then she pushed back her hood and pulled off her mask. I covered my mouth. Startled. Trying to process what I saw.
Or didn’t see.
Tisa’s face was there, but it wasn’t there. The earlier translucence I glimpsed that night over Moscato and hood horror was more pronounced. The blue accent wall was visible through her skin.
“What the fuck, Tisa?”
“I know, girl. I know.” She pulled the hoodie back up. Miserable. A few fingers were fading too.
“You used that crap on your hands?”
“Everywhere.”
“Oh, Sis.” I tried not to stare at my own fingers drumming on the table. “Is it reversible?”
Tisa pushed her plate away. “I don’t know. I DM’ed the owner but she never responded. There’s no number. No address.”
“Sounds sketchy. Was there a return address on the package?”
“Yeah. Some PO box in Lagos.”
For all we knew, the mailbox was fake. I tore off a piece of chicken enchilada. Tisa wasn’t eating it anyway. As I chewed, a horrible thought came to me. What if the bleaching chick wasn’t real? I didn’t recall seeing any videos on her IG or website. Just glowing testimonials from customers. They could have been stock photos.
“What if I fade away completely?”
Tisa’s wail shook me out of my reverie. I rose. “I’m taking you to the ER.”
“Gloria, please. They’ll look at me like I’m some science experiment.”
“Well, what are your other options? You can’t sit in around with the shades drawn and avoid people for the rest of your life.”
By the expression on what remained of Tisa’s face, I knew that’s exactly what she planned on doing. I wanted to hug my bestie, but I was afraid my arms would wrap around some vaporous thing beneath the hoodie.
“I’m gonna find a way to help you, Sis. I promise.”
Tisa walked me to the door. We stood there awkwardly. It felt weird parting without touching. I gave her a church hug then jogged down the walkway to my car. When I looked back at Tisa’s house, her lights were off.
I started researching Dream Maker as soon as I got home. Cyber surveillance ain’t my lane. As Erykah Badu sings, I’m an analog girl in a digital world. But I had to try.
I did a reverse image search on the bleaching lady’s photo. The matches that came back were close, but not her. She looked like a million other contoured, filtered girls. I did the same reverse image search on the customers from her testimonials page. Just as I suspected, they were all stock photos.
I sucked my teeth. Angry at Tisa for trusting this stranger with her precious skin. On a hunch, I went to YouTube. There had to be an influencer doing a review of Dream Maker. Maybe she didn’t use the product long enough for the melanin erasing to take effect.
I found one review. Sierra_Beauty. A brown-skinned woman with glossy lipstick and a twist-out with purple highlights. Her last video was posted two months ago. In it, she held up that dainty bottle of Dream Maker.
“No more hyperpigmentation, Beauties!” Sierra gestured to her smooth ashen skin. “Level up your nighttime routine—”
I stopped the video, touching my face. I didn’t have a nighttime routine. I washed with Noxzema in the morning and that was it. I shuddered to think of the soaked-almonds skin that had shielded me from the elements and connected me with billions of other melanated folks rapidly fading away.
The comments beneath the video were turned off, but Sierra’s business email was listed. I sent her a message with Dream Maker Serious Side Effects in the subject line.
I washed my face before I got in bed. The first time in a while. As I lay in the darkness, I called up Tisa’s IG on my cell phone. She had unblocked me. I swiped to the last post. She sported electric blue cornrows trying to pretend it was a recent photo. I commented, We’re gonna hang out again soon, bestie.
But I didn’t know if we would ever hang out again.
Sierra never replied.
I checked my inbox every day for weeks, but I never heard from her.
I stood in the foyer at Thai Castle one night, searching my inbox as I waited for my order. I started taking dinner to Tisa. She claimed she was still able to eat, but she stopped letting me inside her house. I had to drop off her meals on the steps.
I glanced around the room. It was the only Thai restaurant in Wing. For years, our small Pennsylvania town only boasted three cuisines besides American—Italian, Mexican and Chinese. Tisa convinced me to go to Thai Castle when it opened last fall. She knew I wasn’t adventurous. I’m a hoagies and burgers kinda girl.
I felt sick thinking of all the things me and bestie might never experience. We might never again take a trip down the shore, never take another Thelma & Louise style selfie before hitting the road.
Regret encircled me, as heavy as the brass elephant sculpture in the foyer. As I grabbed my bags from the hostess, an email notification popped up on my phone. From Sierra. Three words: Can you talk?
“I had to make sure you weren’t with that company.”
The voice on the other end of the phone sounded far away.
“How do you know I’m not?” I asked Sierra.
“Well, you were sus at first. Not many IG posts, like a bot trying to create a fake identity.” There was a pause on the other end. “Then I checked your followers. Saw a girl with a washed-out skin tone.”
“Tisa. My bestie. I gotta find a way to help her,” I said. “Is it reversible?”
“There’s a solution.” Sierra puffed on something. “But it’s drastic.”
I gripped the bag of Thai food. Dinner was cold, but Tisa could warm it up.
“What is it? My girl is desperate.”
Sierra took another drag of whatever she was smoking. “Let’s chat in person.”
Sierra lived in Maryland. She wouldn’t say where, but she agreed to meet me in Middletown, Delaware. It would take an hour to drive there.
It was 7:30 when I dropped the food off at Tisa’s house and hit the road. Traffic had died down on the Blue Route.
Finally, I arrived at our meeting spot. Middletown was an idyllic little place right out of the 1950s with colonial homes and Mom-and-Pop shops. I parked near a playground and left the engine running. The area seemed creepy with no streetlamps. Ten minutes later, headlights gleamed in my rearview. A black Kia pulled up behind my car. The driver didn’t get out. I squinted at the front license plate. Maryland tags.
I opened the door, walking slowly toward the Kia.
The windows were tinted. As I approached the driver’s side, the window lowered a crack.
“Get in,” Sierra said.
Relieved, I made my way to the passenger side. The dark windows prevented me from seeing who else was inside. I hoped it wasn’t a trap.
There was a click as the door unlocked. I expected the dome light to flash on when I opened the door, but it didn’t. An Afrobeats song played softly on the stereo. A ring of smoke hung in the air. Sierra was vaping.
But no one was in the driver’s seat.
A vape pen hovered in midair. After what happened to Tisa, I wasn’t shocked at the sight of the floating device. Just numb. As I took a seat, my hand brushed against something tangled on the console. A wig.
“Not what you were expecting?” Sierra asked.
“I don’t know what I expected.”
That’s not true. I expected to see a whole woman, someone able to drive without causing a stir. My stomach burned. I didn’t know how Sierra would be able to save my bestie when she hadn’t been able to save herself from the devastating effects of this toxic cream.
Sierra killed the engine. We stared straight ahead at the back of my Honda as she vaped. How ironic that the smoke rings she exhaled were more visible than she was. I fiddled with my keyring, wondering about the drastic solution she proposed.
Before I could ask, Sierra said, “There are more GFs than you think.”
“GFs?”
“Ghostfishers.”
I turned to look at her–or at least look in the direction of the curling smoke. “That’s what you call yourselves?”
“Yeah. Like people who catfish, cosplaying as someone they’re not.” The leather squeaked as she shifted in her seat. “One of the girls came up with the name. A GF from Detroit. She joked that we faded our skin on purpose to attract ghost baes.”
“Boos.”
The smoke spewed out in a jittery cloud as Sierra laughed. “That’s a good one.” Then she grew serious. “I never bought that stuff to look whiter. I just wanted to get rid of my dark spots.”
“So did Tisa.”
“I lost so much more than my so-called flaws. My family. My job. My fiancée.”
“You said there was a solution. A drastic one.”
“There is.” The vape pen floated down, clinking in the console. “You have to abandon life as you once knew it. Go underground.”
My stomach roiled again. “That ain’t no damn solution. Tisa has a life here.”
“Had.”
“There gotta be some GFs who are more visible than others. Can’t they go to the police?”
“And say what? ‘Hey, guys. We were conned into using a cream that fades us out of existence?’ Girl, please.
That would really put a target on our back, especially the fully faded ones. We’re accidental spies. You know how dangerous that makes us?”
I hadn’t thought about that. Being invisible could be a valuable weapon. So why had the manufacturers targeted Black women? Maybe Dream Maker was genocide in a bottle and invisibility was an unintended side effect.
“How come you’re not warning folks about this toxic shit?”
“You don’t think we tried? In April, a GF from Houston posted a video on the dangers of Dream Maker. She was just pale then. But the video got taken down. Her channel got deleted. Her socials. It was like she’d been scrubbed from the internet. I didn’t remove my review because I thought it could be a beacon for other users.”
The engine hummed to life. “I have to get back for dinner,” Sierra said. “My ex-fiancée puts a plate in the windowsill for me every night.”
My mind drifted to my bestie. As if reading my thoughts, Sierra said, “We need more GFs to help us fight.”
“Tisa’s not a fighter.”
“All the more reason to join us. We’re gonna figure out who runs Dream Maker and take them down. We have ghostfishers in Canada. Brazil. Nigeria. She needs to surround herself with a tribe who understands.”
“I am her tribe.”
I opened the door and stepped out. I stood there for a few minutes, staring at the wig discarded on the console. It was black with hot pink highlights. A pretty fly disguise. Even invisible girls have the need for a vibrant life.
I closed the door. The Kia pulled off down the street.
I drove back to Wing, reflecting on the ghostfishers. Even though their sisterhood was formed under extreme circumstances, I felt a twinge of envy knowing a secret society of invisible Black women existed. I always get left out of everything.
I didn’t tell Tisa about my meeting with Sierra. I had all but promised my bestie I’d find some way to heal her and I failed.
I started avoiding Tisa. I felt like a coward on my bus route. I was responsible for hundreds of people getting safely to their destination, but I couldn’t protect my girl.
After a few weeks of dumping food on Tisa’s steps and taking off, I got over myself. I had to let her know there was an option. Although it was radical, she wouldn’t have to be alone.
A jack-o-lantern seemed to blaze from every porch as I drove down her block. One neighbor had a huge plastic skeleton positioned in the yard wearing a green Eagles t-shirt. Halloween is a high holy day for most residents of my small town.
Tisa’s house was dark as usual. I grabbed the dinner bag from the passenger seat. Thai food again. I bought a container of drunken noodles for myself. I hurried up the walkway, still wearing my work uniform. As I approached the door, I paused.
Last night’s dinner was still sitting on her steps. A tuna hoagie with extra onions and olive oil. Grease seeped through the white paper bag.
I tried not to panic as I banged on Tisa’s screen door. I hoped she hadn’t grown so despondent that she hurt herself. I fished in my purse for the spare key and let myself in.
There was a hollow click as I turned on the light. The house was still.
“Tisa! Are you home?”
My bestie wasn’t much of a house cleaner, but there was more dust than usual. On the baseboards. On the picture frames lining her accent table. I glanced at a photo of us. Our last Thelma & Louise selfie before our road-trip to Atlantic City the year before. Two carefree brown girls about to soak up the sun.
“Tisa? You didn’t eat dinner last night.”
I stood in the doorway of her bedroom and flicked on the light. The comforter was jumbled, as if she had kicked it off in a hurry before leaping out of bed. I waited in the musty silence, trying to detect movement. Even if she were hiding from me, I would still be able to feel her presence. Hear her breathing. The only sound was the muted drone of a vacant house.
Tisa’s laptop was in sleep mode on her desk. I knew her password. 0825. The day Aaliyah’s plane went down. It’s harder to forget something associated with tragedy.
I typed in her password. The sleeping laptop awakened. The first thing I saw was a YouTube page. The video was paused on Sierra’s smiling face holding an elegant pink bottle aloft.
I closed the laptop. Stunned. Did Tisa meet up with Sierra without me? How did she drive? Her car didn’t have tinted windows.
I rushed back outside. I needed air. Tisa hadn’t left for good, I convinced myself. I didn’t see a goodbye note, and she wouldn’t do me like that. Maybe she just went for a walk.
I trudged back to my car. The twinkling orange lights in her neighbors’ windows taunted me. All the houses on the lane seemed filled with a glowing expectancy of some coming celebration but nobody left any snacks for me.
Some days when I maneuver my bus through the streets of Wing, a Black girl standing at the bus stop catches my eye. She twirls the ends of her hot pink braids as I pull up to the curb. The girl nods at me as she boards and taps her keycard on the validator. Then she strolls to her seat.
It’s nearly Thanksgiving. Tisa’s mom has been blowing my phone up, but I can’t bring myself to talk to her. She knows me and Tisa are joined at the hip. How could I explain that her daughter has chosen an unfiltered kind of sisterhood where she finally feels seen.
At least, that’s what I think Tisa did. I emailed Sierra but she never responded. I hope she’s okay. I hope all the GFs are. I hope Tisa finds that neon life she always craved. I like to picture her gliding along the beach at midday, arms outstretched, no longer hiding from the sun.
I still leave a bag of food on her steps every night.
Just in case.
About the Author
Nicole D. Sconiers is the author of Escape from Beckyville: Tales of Race, Hair and Rage, a speculative fiction short-story collection that has been taught at colleges and universities around the country. Her work has appeared in Nightmare magazine, Lightspeed magazine, Speculative City, NIGHTLIGHT: A Horror Fiction Podcast, and PodCastle. Her short story “A Bird Sings by the Etching Tree” appeared in the New York Times bestselling horror anthology Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams. Out There Screaming recently won a Bram Stoker award.
About the Artist
H. Lee Messina is an east coast native, self-taught artist, and owner of The Dutch Spork. The bulk of her creative work includes mixed media collage and digital paintings utilizing magazine clippings and a simple drawing table. You can view more of her work here.