" What do you think of all this?” he said. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never heard anything like it.” But that wasn’t exactly true. She’d always known that it was possible to be two different people in one lifetime, or maybe it was only possible for some. Maybe others were just stuck with who they were. She’d tried to lighten her skin once, during her first summer in Mallard. She was still young enough then to believe that such a thing was possible, yet old enough to understand that it would require a degree of alchemy that she didn’t quite understand. Magic. She wasn’t foolish enough to hope that someday she might be light, but a deep brown maybe, anything better than this endless black. "

― Brit Bennett , The Vanishing Half