The Cinderella Game

Tiffany

                  

Tiffany already had her dress and everything picked out by the time her grandmother came over to visit for the weekend. She proudly showed her everything that she and her Fairy Godmother had chosen, and her grandmother laughed, shaking her head.

"This was so much different back when we did this," she told Tiffany. Tiffany didn't know what she meant. Her grandmother showed her old pictures of her in her dress for the school dance, and Tiffany figured that maybe she was talking about the clothes being different.

But as she talked to her grandmother, she realized that things weren't so different at all.

"Do the girls in your school still do the Cinderella Game?" her grandmother asked.

Tiffany was surprised her grandmother knew about that. "I'm not sure if it's against the rules to tell you about that part," she said hesitantly.

Her grandmother laughed. "Oh, no, honey, it's not, I should know, I wrote them myself."

"You did?" Tiffany asked, staring at her grandmother in shock.

"Well, part of them. I was waiting to tell you until you were in high school," she said, smiling wistfully. "Well, when I was in high school, a bunch of my friends and I decided that just having a school dance every year to elect a Prom Queen wasn't enough, and we wanted to do something more. Well, the movie Cinderella first came out a little around then, and we all loved the idea, and so over the course of a few slumber parties, we toyed with the idea of a real life Cinderella and worked it out into the nine rules, and we explained it to all the girls in our grade, and it stuck. So that year, we had the Homecoming Queen arrange everything, as a senior, and that was how the Cinderella Game started. Your dad was actually a Prince, although he never realized it."

Tiffany gaped at her grandmother. "You started the Cinderella Game?" she asked again.

"Yes, do you know anyone in it?" Her grandmother asked, smiling.

Tiffany gasped, knocking over a few picture frames that sat on her bedside table. "I'm one of the ten in the game," she told her grandmother.

Her grandmother's eyes widened and she rocked back and forth on the bed. "Well, in that case, I should stop telling you all this, but first, can I see the rules, see what's changed?"

Tiffany showed her therules, and her grandmother said that they were almost exactly the same as theyhad been, and then they stopped talking about the game because Tiffany wasafraid that she would somehow break the rules.