When GeneSaver was first founded, fifty-three years before Darcy James was born, there was plenty of debate. Genetically altering humans, although completely legal, was the cause of a public uproar. But when all the babies born after the procedure were perfectly healthy, Perfection became mainstream. 
As time went on, it was discovered that the same procedure used to make sure a child’s DNA was healthy could be used to alter the child’s appearance.  Hundreds of thousands of parents were willing to create the “perfect” child, and were willing to pay to do so. A person could tell how old a child was by the way they looked. Children with red hair and green eyes were all born in 2103, black haired children with hazel eyes were all born in 2102, and all children born in 2101 all had blonde hair and blue eyes.
Well, all except Darcy James.
Darcy clutched her binder to her chest, ducking around her taller, blonder peers. She went unnoticed. This was normal. The door creaked as Darcy entered her first class, World History. She was the first one in the room. Her desk was in the far right corner, away from the others and the teacher. She powered up her tablet and signed in with the retinal scan.
Slowly, other students arrived at class. They chatted like parrots amongst themselves, and paid no attention to Darcy. This was normal. Everyone liked normal.
The teacher arrived, giving Darcy a little nod. There were rumors that he was unaltered too, with his mousy brown hair and brown eyes, but they were just rumors. He shuffled something on his desk. Darcy gasped quietly. They were papers. These were extremely rare, seeing as most of the forests of the world had been wiped out a hundred years before. Just about everything Darcy had ever learned from was electronic.
Class started. The scanner in the corner of the room started to take attendance. Just before the scanner’s beam made it to Darcy’s corner of the room, a blond boy dove into his seat next to her.
“No- no- none absent,” The machine’s voice wheezed. The thing was fifteen years old, and it needed replacing.  Mackie Lewis sighed in relief.
“What happened to you? You live next door. How can I make it to school on time and you can’t?” Darcy muttered under her breath. Mackie smirked.
“Missed my ride, Darce.” Mackie explained, running a hand through his hair. “Also, socializing is a thing.”
“I don’t do much of it,” Darcy shrugged. Mackie’s smile fell a little.
“Sorry,” He said. Darcy ignored him. She was paying attention to the front of the room, where the teacher stood behind his desk.
“Good morning. I’ve received some material from the library about the culture of the people who lived before 2019.” The teacher began. He was interrupted by a collective groan, but he continued to talk, “This class is going to do a project on them.” 
The teacher began to walk around the classroom. He handed out a piece of paper to each desk.  “I would like you to read the articles, and then choose an aspect of their culture and make a presentation about it. The project is due next Tuesday.”
Darcy read frantically. When she reached the bottom of the page, she read the entire article again. She took a few mental notes of some names from the article. She’d look them up when she finished planning her project.
The people from before didn’t have their genes altered. This realization hit just after one of her Perfect classmates noticed it. Darcy saw the projection of a brown haired woman from his tablet towards the front of the room. The Perfect girl next to him giggled.
“Sam, Sam, look. They look like the freak back there,” The Perfect girl said loudly. She gestured to the back corner. Darcy shut her eyes. She didn’t notice Mackie flinch.
“Quiet down,” The teacher said.
Darcy blinked quickly. She returned to her project, but she couldn’t keep working. As the school day continued, she couldn’t stay focused. The Perfect girl’s comment was normal. Everyone liked normal, except Darcy. Darcy didn’t particularly like that part of normal.
In the last class of the day, biology, she came up with what she thought was a clever idea. The Perfection procedure altered the DNA in a cell. Babies had cells, but so did every human. Why couldn’t the procedure be done on a teenager?
The day ticked on slowly. Darcy thought she’d go insane before the bell rang. Finally, it did, buzzing through the school building, and Darcy powered down her tablet and put it away in her bag. She stayed in her seat until all of her classmates left.
Darcy then left the classroom, and grabbed her coat from her storage unit. She went back down the hallway towards the last person still there.
“I need to do some research, Mack. Please come with me?” Darcy pleaded, standing next to her friend’s storage unit. No one roamed the halls after school other than Mackie and Darcy. Mackie insisted that she talk to him after school because no one liked being seen with the only dark haired sophomore in school, no matter how much Mackie truly enjoyed her company.
Mackie smiled. “You’re lucky I don’t have to work tonight, James. I’ll go.” He shut the door to his unit. Darcy could hear the gears click smoothly into place. The container locked.
“Thank you so much, Mackie. I owe you one.”
The two left the empty school, and Darcy got into her car, followed by Mackie, who sat next to her, slinging his bag into the back seat and putting his feet onto the dash. Darcy sent him a glare. He laughed, sitting upright.
Darcy pressed the coordinates of Jefferson Public Library into the car’s keypad. Confirming this order in a monotone voice, the car coughed to life. It grudgingly drove itself to the highway, and then the world was a colorful blur amongst other cars and the billboards. 
“Do you want me to replace your car’s voice box? It’s so bland. I learned how,” Mackie offered. Darcy shook her head.
“It’s still not my car.” Darcy said. “It’s Mom’s. You know that. She’d kill me if I did anything to her baby.”
Mackie rolled his eyes. The car followed the electromagnetic path of the highway into the parking lot of the last library. The car powered down, plugging itself into the solar charger by each parking spot. Darcy and Mackie grabbed their bags and entered the library.
The library was close to being deserted. Two people sat at tables reading, and dust billowed through the sunlight that streamed through the high windows like spotlights. The librarian slouched behind her desk, watching a video projected from her tablet. As she saw Darcy and Mackie enter, she paused the video.
“Hi, how can I help you?” she said, overly cheerful.
“We’re working on a project about the people before Perfection, from around 2019. Also, I’m looking at studying the Perfection process.”  Darcy said.  The librarian pointed out where they could find the information they were looking for. Mackie thanked her. and the two began to select books. They would much rather use the internet for their research, but much of the information they needed was restricted to teenagers.
“What were you thinking about doing for your project, Mack?” Darcy asked.
“I was thinking about the different types of music from that time. Evolution of it, maybe. The article Mr. Dameron gave us mentioned that there was a lot of different music back then. What were you going to do?”
“Movies. You know my dad loves classic movies. Star Wars, Harry Potter, all the classics. I just need to get some information about the actors in them.”
“Then why do you have all those books?” Mackie asked. He gestured to the pile of books Darcy was hauling to the checkout counter.
“Side project. About genetics. About the Perfection,” Darcy said. Mackie was silent for a minute. He knew Darcy well enough to know what she was planning. The two had been friends since Mackie moved next door about ten years before. The two were too young to understand their differences.
“There’s a reason they do it on unborn babies, Darce.” He said.
“I know,”  Darcy said, dropping the books on the counter. The librarian checked them out one by one.
It was dark when Mackie and Darcy sat down at a table and began to read their books. The library doors opened again. All five people inside looked to see who entered. Three girls, two blonde and one with straight black hair. They laughed loudly at an unheard joke. Darcy didn’t look at them. She buried her nose in her book. She begged an unknown being that the girls, Perfected girls, didn’t notice her.
Her stomach flipped and twisted as they grew nearer. Her heart pounded so hard that she bet that Mackie could hear it from the other side of the table.
The girls passed by Darcy’s table, still talking amongst themselves. Darcy let out a trembling breath as they walked on without noticing her. She returned to the top of the page she had been reading, having lost her place. Then she heard it.
“Look at her, that ugly one.”
Darcy set the book down with a silent sob. Mackie gave her a glance and nudged her ankle with his shoe. He tried his hardest not to draw any more attention to the two of them.  Darcy didn’t need it.
After what felt like forever, the librarian connected her tablet to those of the patrons. “The library closes in five minutes. Have a wonderful evening.” The projection blinked away. Mackie and Darcy packed away the books in their bags.
The two got back into the car, and they were on their way back to the city they lived in. On the drive back, Mackie played a game on his tablet while Darcy read the Perfection books. “Any luck, Darcy?” Mackie asked.
“Nothing.” Darcy sighed. She slammed one book shut and picked up another. “There’s no way to fix me.” Mackie stared at her with kind sympathy. The book’s text was complicated, as Darcy was only able to get through the introduction of the book before she arrived at the apartment building.
They ran up three flights of stairs. Darcy turned right and Mackie turned left. “See you tomorrow,” Mackie said as he disappeared into his family’s apartment.
“Bye,” Darcy said quietly, ducking into her apartment. Her parents were away. It was silent. She turned on the light and threw her backpack on the couch.
Darcy piled all her books on the kitchen table. She sat down and began to read. Hours passed so slowly it was agonizing. The pile of unread books diminished at the same pace. By one o’clock, Darcy had fallen asleep, slumped over the book she had been reading. She had found no solution to her problem.
“WAKE UP!” The clock screeched, metallic voice ringing through the apartment. Darcy sat up with a jolt. It took her a moment to realize that it was Saturday. The clock’s alarm had been misprogrammed. Massaging the kink out of her neck, Darcy gathered all the books she had borrowed and her bag. She brought them with her to her room.
Darcy decided that it was no use to go back to sleep. The sun shone through the windows, like the library. But instead of dust and the musty smell of old paper wafting through the air, the room was spotless and white. She pulled out her tablet and went to the GeneSaver webpage. Maybe they’d have answers. They’d fix her stupid genes, and she’d be normal.
She pulled up the FAQ page. The first question, and its answer, hit her like a brick.
Q: Can my child have the Perfection done after they are born?
A: No. They cannot. There are only a handful of cells in a fetus. There are 26 billion cells in a newborn baby. To have the procedure done after birth would not guarantee desired results. Therefore, a child can only have the Perfection before birth.
Darcy dropped the tablet. She’d be stuck with her stupid brown hair and her stupid brown eyes and be the freak of the school forever. She didn’t fit in, couldn’t fit in. She could dye her hair, but everyone would know. She was the only person she knew who didn’t have the Perfection. Was she the only one? She had never known for sure. Darcy decided to find out.
After searching the website for what felt like a few hours, she found that there were three thousand, seven hundred and sixty one children who were born in 2101 that had the Perfection. Darcy then opened a new tab. She searched the total number of children born in 2101. Three thousand, seven hundred and sixty three. A difference of two. Two people her age who didn’t have the Perfection, for whatever reason.
“There’s one more,” Darcy breathed. “There’s one more person like me.” Relieved tears pricked behind her eyes. She blinked them away. Now, to find them. This would be difficult. The website didn’t mention names, for privacy reasons.
She drafted a post that the whole world could see. If the whole world saw it, surely the other person would too. As she typed the words, she read them out loud. “Hello. My name is Darcy James, and I’m one of two people born in 2101 who, before birth, did not have the Perfection. If you are the other unPerfected person, please contact me at djames@umail.wor. Thank you.”
  She published the post, and she could watch the people start to view the page. Moments after the bulletin published, the comments started rolling in. All of them were from the Perfected. Darcy could tell. Every single comment was jarring and rude.
  Across the hallway, Mackie Lewis signed onto his tablet, ready to work on his World History project. He saw Darcy’s bulletin. Mackie sighed loudly. “Maybe I’ll tell her on Monday,” he told himself. “Yeah, I’ll tell her then.”