She was born Beige White, in the sense that was her name rather than any particular reference to a pallid pigmentation as she entered this world. It would be fair to say that Beige hated her name from the moment she understood it’s rather dull and suburban connotations, ironically a punctilious depiction of her very parents who had now condemned their only child to an inescapable existence of the same.

Beige often wondered if there was a psychological condition that explained people who literally became as their names. After all, it was accepted that some husbands and wives started to resemble one another after many years of marriage; or dog owners who became distinctly canine in their outward demeanours. So why not those who become their names? After all, she was living proof and the older she got the more beige Beige became. And it was simply misery.

Throughout school Beige was distinctly average. There was nothing impressive about her academic endeavours but neither was there anything to worry about. Beige simply didn’t stand out at all.

By the time she reached her teens she was being overlooked by the boys, who instead flocked after much prettier or sexier girls. Beige just literally blended into the teenage background, her rather boring virginity the only thing that made her different from the others.

On the eve of her sixteenth birthday Beige cried her eyes out. She dreaded the mundane adult life of mediocrity that now lay before her, a life that seemed shaped like the practical but unexciting angles of Scandinavian furniture. If that was to be her life, her beige existence, then Beige didn’t want to live it.

The following more she rose early, feeling the most determined she had ever felt.

In the kitchen she took the sharpest knife she could find and shakily sat at the breakfast table.

She knew this was it; that this was to be the end of Beige.

With one swift slice of the blade, she cut through the envelope and pulled out the change of name information pack from inside it.