The Cinderella Agreement (Completed) [Featured Story]

01: The Realization

SOME PEOPLE are born great, others work to achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them... and there are those awkward oddities that somehow don't seem to belong on the spectrum at all.

     Mit Laden fell deep into the last category, at least, according to the rules of high school hierarchy.

     She wasn't particularly sunk rock bottom, but was perched somewhat close to it nonetheless, as if she was skirting about a cliff's edge that posed the great divide between somebody and nobody, in plain high school terminology. She was a bit of an anybody.

     Being anybody was admittedly a comfortable position for her, even though she often went unnoticed or overlooked; a mere background filler to another person's story. She had only one problem with her position; her plain, average self that always seemed to blend into the backdrop with more skill than a chameleon.

     Marshall Andrews would never notice her.

     Reluctant to accept the truth, her first instinct was to blame Mother Nature, as she always did for all her other problems. Evil Step-Mother Nature had most probably imprinted a large stamp upon Mit's forehead, whose purpose was built for veering off all members of the opposite sex away from her.

     She'd confess to checking in the mirror several times to assess her theory, and then re-assess it, finding nothing at the end of the day, save for a few zits here and there. No humongous stamp. Which, of course, led her to the formation of a new theorem:

     Mother Nature had used invisible ink.

     Her destiny became sealed one fateful Monday during lunch. She was wearing her well practiced disgusted face near the hot food hatch, the face that most kids always had fixated within the vicinity of the lunchroom.

     The plain truth was, Mit didn't have anything against the cafeteria food. She actually enjoyed it, in fact. But after her experience on the first day of her freshman year two years ago, she soon came to discover that that behaviour was below par of societal expectations.

     Since the forces of Nature and Mankind seemed to hate her, to the point where she wondered if she was a mass killer in her past life, Mit had learned the lesson the hard way: getting called Meatloaf Mit and then later, Laden the Bomber after she had accidentally let one loose during a P.E. test. It really wasn't her fault; she had been nervous and didn't cope well under pressure.

     To top it all off, she had failed the class as well, on grounds of 'assaulting a teacher and fellow classmates to unconsciousness.' She wasn't blameworthy, in her opinion, towards the fact that they had weak lungs. If anything, they should have been grateful for her philanthropic effort to harden them in case of a tear gas attack in the near future.

     And let's not even talk about how she shared last names with a dead terrorist.

     Mit had practiced for days on end to perfect her disgusted face, at times paralysing her facial muscles in the process and having to look at everyone for at least twelve hours with a countenance that resembled one inflicted with constipation. But alas, she'd perfected it at last. Heck, hers would soon surpass that of the lunch lady, and that's saying something, since the woman stared at everything like she wanted it to shrivel up and die.

     With Mother Nature seemingly having taken pity upon Mit to at least waive from her horrible stamp temporarily, Marshall Andrews turned his head nearly exactly at that moment, 12:16 pm, Monday, August the twenty eighth, so that he was looking directly at her.

     Her body froze, impeccable mask faltering rapidly, wishing to record the exact coordinates of she and Marshall's position in the room and halt time infinitely. She would tell the story to their kids: 'Children, this was the exact moment that your dad realised that your mom was a peng ting that shalt not be slept on.' Maybe there was a hidden camera nearby, that had been capturing everything; she would reel the film at their wedding in France to commemorate the good old times whilst they sipped champagne with Beyoncé.

     Or something like that.

     She waved, but her fifteen minutes of fame had worn off sooner than she would've have preferred, Mother Nature perhaps getting bored with her, and Marshall's gaze continued rotation round the room, as if nothing happened, as if she hadn't just planned out almost every detail of their future in only a compacted three seconds.

     Marshall was waving back, but not at her, she ascertained, and with a deep frown Mit turned around seeking the saboteur that worked to snatch her future husband from her.

     She was met with the sight of the lunch lady, popularly nicknamed Dorothy the Sorrowthy, herself whom never smiled, baring all twenty nine of her yellowed teeth for a few are missing, to shoot Marshall a grin of her own, waggling her beefy arm about in a wave.

     It was all in good mannerism, Mit convinced herself, for she knew how good natured her future husband was, but she couldn't stop her jaw from practically dropping to the floor with a force that might have cracked the linoleum. She came to as Dorothy smacked a blob of mysterious looking meatloaf onto her lunch tray, having reverted to her glum expression.

     "Move it, hussy," snarled Dorothy, already getting set to serve the next student.

     Mit's feet shuffled forward of their own accord, her head lowered to stare at the brown substance on her tray, gobsmacked.

     It was a very defining moment for her, the moment that marked her plunge from anybody into the dark abyss of nobody-ness, seeing as she was unimportant enough to be disregarded in favour of a middle-aged high school lunch lady. Perhaps in Marshall's perspective she was invisible, a greyscale extra occupying space. She was mere matter to him, and the realization sucked.

     Finality then stroke,as well as the beginning of something new; she had officially hit rock bottom, but the good thing about rock bottom was that there was only one direction left to go: up.