Well, after searching both desktop hard drives and the laptop earlier, I thought I'd lost the notes and early writings I'd done on my novel. Then it occured to me to check the NAS (network attached storage) drive and lo and behold, there they were - and in the documents folder with my name on it none the less (which is separate from the one the whole family has stuff stored in and one just for Garvin). None of my other writings (poetry, fanfiction, old short stories, etc) was in there (tho all that was in other places where I *thought* I'd also had my novel's notes). Very strange. Turns out the character that was bugging me so much for a name had never actually been named in the first place (tho her mother had). I spent the time at church today borrowing the computer of one of the staff members (couldn't get wifi working on my bberry there, need to ask if there's a network key or something, or I would have tried to search for names on it instead). Decided on a name for the daughter and her mother, and the new name fits the mother better than the one I had intended to use. So now the characters aren't shouting "YO! Beeautch! Wha's ma name?" in my head anymore at least (my characters insult me on a regular basis, but in a friendly familial way I promise. And they don't actually talk with such coarse language in the novel. They are not gangsta, just playin).
Anyway, while searching for the stuff from my novel I found this very short story that I wrote sometime in high school (guessing probably senior year - 1994-1995 - due to the mention of Woodstock '94, and Garvin is sure that I wrote it before we met in early 1996 as it wasn't familiar and I generally force him to listen to listen to me read any new writings aloud). It made me laugh to read and thought it might give others a chuckle too. Please note that, dispite being a retelling of a fairytale, it is NOT suitable for children!
Rapunzel Gets a Makover
Ahmie Polak (my maiden name)
No, it didn't happen "once upon a time." That is too kind for the characters of this story. To me, this story begins "once upon a 1970's..."
There was a couple, I won't say man and wife, because that would have angered the wife, a woman's lib fanatic, made her feel that I was insinuating she was less than the man in some way. This couple had been together for some years, and had decided that the time was right in their carreers for them to have a child. Unfortunately, nature didn't agree, and they had trouble concieving. The problem seemed to lie in the man's underpants, and possibly in the fact that he was a little too, shall we say, generous, with the contents therein. He had a low sperm count, partially from overuse, which wasn't always with said female half of the couple. And it also bears relavent that Belinda, the woman with whom the man was wasting his limited excesses with, was barren. Belinda, while not a witch by modern standards, was a bit on the psycotic side, given to fits of insane, jealous rage. When she learned that "her" man was trying to have a child with the "other" woman, she, to put it nicely, became quite irrate. Actually.... she threw herself, kicking and screaming, on the floor at the man's feet and swore, if he didn't give her the child his wife would soon carry, that she would tell the dear woman everything and help her sue him for every penny he had. Considering the man had been in the Senate for a number of years, this amounted to much more than he cared for the public to know about. Petrified of the consequinces of a scandle, expecially since it was an election year, he promised that he would somehow give the child to Belinda after it was born.
It came to pass that the woman gave birth to a baby girl, but she never knew any more than that about the child. The senator calmly and smoothly had arranged that shortly after the child's birth, the mother would be told that it had been stillborn, and the child would be delivered to Belinda. The woman wept and tore her hair, nearly distroying a few hours' work from the beauty parlor, when she heard that her child was dead. We must remember, nazi-feminists do have feelings too. The man comforted her and promised they would try again, but of course, the woman refused. She looked at him with tear-stained eyes, black splotches of mascara running down her face, and exclaimed "Can't we just adopt???"
After seeing that the woman was properly and completely sedated with rather stronger-than-nessissary medications, the man went and spoke to Belinda.
"You've got what you've wanted. Now get out of here, and never come near me again, or I'll make you the sorriest woman on the face of the planet."
"Of course. What more could I possibly want? Except some money to raise this child with," she said, with a rather frightening smile.
Digging into his pockets, the senator took out his checkbook and wrote her a check for five hundred thousand dollars [editing note: back then, that was a lot of money, right?].
"And don't come looking for any more than that, unless the kid wants to go to college or something."
***
Belinda raised the child as her own, claiming to have given birth to her at home. Since she was a loner and rarely came out of her house, even less so during the nine month period when the other woman had been pregnant, no one had noticed that she had not gained an ounce during that interum. The child was named Rochelle and raised as if she were the queen of the world, until, spoiled and ignorant, she actually believed it.
Rochelle was perfect, at least in her own and Belinda's eyes. She always had all the solos in choir (more because the choir teacher was terrified of Belinda than any actual talent on Rochelle's part) and the leads in the school play. She had long, thick hair that Belinda let her start dying blonde and perming when she was only four years old. She was quite stunning, in a self-centered, completely unnatural, early 1980's sort of way. And it came to pass that, as she grew older, Rochelle became quite the little snob, eventually having no friends at all - which she blamed on their "imperfections" - and wound up spending a great deal of her time in their penthouse apartment watching MTV and trying to dress like Madonna. Nothing could have made Belinda happier.
Things went on like this for, sadly, an extremely long time, and it wasn't until around 1992 that things started to change. This was the year that Rochelle entered high school, and one of the most miserable years of her life. Rochelle discovered boys, and it didn't start with just any dweeblie boy. It started with the guy who played center for the school's boy soccer team. To say this guy was hot would be like saying that Bevis and Butthead are idiotic. This guy defined the word hot, but in a different way than the guy Belinda would have approved of. This boy, who's name (as if it were important) I might add was John, was the head-freak of the school. He started wearing grunge clothes before everyone else started to and sporting long, dark purple hair. While this may not sound too great looking to someone over the age of twenty-eight, he was also blessed with a body that would have put a young Hulk Holgan to shame and a face with a close resemblance to Keanu Reeves. Rochelle actually swooned the first time she saw him look right through her.
John didn't go for girls like Rochelle, ones that still made love to their hairspray bottles for forty-five minutes each morning and only wore clothes from the GAP. He perfered girls who didn't bother much with grooming (though he would turn and bolt if they didn't brush their hair and teeth and at least bath occassionally), and liked the look of girls who shopped mostly at thrift stores. Now, Rochelle may not have been the brightest girl in her classes, but every female of every species quickly adapts and learns how to lure and snare the males in elaborate courtship rituals, sublte and demure or agressive and deadly, and Rochelle was no different. She noticed which girls in the hallway John would notice, what they wore, how they did their hair, and soon began emulating it, much to Belinda's horror and dismay. Rochelle went grunge. She had her overly-permed hair straightened and dyed black, and stopped her thrice weekly trips to the tanning parlor, opting instead to hide in dark rooms to achieve the death-palor look of the girls that John aproached. She started giving her clothes to the Salvation Army, then shopping there for hours at a time when Belinda thought she was at the mall. Basically, Rochelle started to look like a rag-a-muffin. And she started to go by the name "Roach" to the people who suddenly started speaking to her. Belinda was stunned. Belinda tried grounding her. John noticed "Roach" and started hanging around her. Rochelle was on cloud nine.
One Friday it so happened that John's scheduled date became ill, and so he asked "Roach" if she would like to accompany him to the poetry reading he was going to. Rochelle, eager to get her claws into the delicious John, quickly accepted, and blew off Belinda's attempts to keep her at home. When John arrived on his Harley, Rochelle swung her leg over the back, held on tight with one arm, and waved goodbye to Belinda. Belinda knew then that she had lost her little fluffchick forever.
In the days and weeks that came after, John took to the task of expanding and enlightening Rochelle's horribly crippled and empty mind. He showed her local bands and helped her understand the lyrics. He took her to the art museum. He took her other places and did other things with her that I don't think it would be appropriate to mention here, using certain other objects that are just as unappropriate to mention. Let me just say that certain companies of certain products not advertised on most public telivision made quite a few dollars off of John and Rochelle at that time. Rochelle became a new person, interesting and intellegent, and actually won John's heart. Finally, John asked Rochelle to run away with him and elope. Rochelle agreed, and they left that night, taking little more than a change of clothes and a Harley that was in desperate need of a tune-up. Last time they were heard from, someone who had gone to school with them saw them at Woodstock '94, bickering and fighting over the screams of a small baby that Rochelle was trying to breastfeed.
[wow, I was a big fan of the word "and" in high school. Sorry for the typos, this was a plain text/Notepad document and I didn't run it through a spellcheck, and cut-and-pasting seems to have FireFox ignoring the errors in it - I did catch a few.]
