"The name Red was not so easily explained, for her hair was not red, but brown. It started, she thought, with her true name, that is, the one her parents gave her, Everett Brennan. The obvious nickname might have been Rhett, perhaps even for a girl, but it would not sit properly. She developed a habit at an early age, however, of robbing her father’s bureau of one of his folded handkerchiefs, soft from a hundred turns in the washtub, and a hundred days riding in his pocket and mopping his brow. Rolled and knotted about her throat on any given day, that kerchief became a constant, and should her father’s drawer present her with a choice of color, she always favored red. So perhaps, after that, someone who meant to call out her name on some breathless chase through the Pax felt the word turn in its trajectory, mutate, and fall short, only three consolidated letters. And as a name will birth you, she was born, as the color of a mark, of a stain, of an opening where none was expected: Red."