Epilogue 109 - None of That

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...Previously...



Winifred Pale was fuming. School was out, but Winifred still walked impatiently among the empty classrooms. She had scoured the halls of Underborough High thrice over, and still could not find hide nor hair of Angela Morgan. Yesterday, she had missed what Winifred considered a very important after-school meeting, and missing two in a row would be completely out of the question. Just when she was about to give up and return home, she heard a muffled but familiar voice coming from the women's lavatory.

"See, it worked! I still can't quite figure out why, though!"

Winifred swung the door open with a loud "a-HA!" Despite her shout of discovery, she was actually quite surprised at what she saw. She was sure she heard Angela, but standing before her was practically a different young woman from the one Winifred had seen a mere two days ago. Reacting to Winifred's entrance, Angela turned towards the door suddenly, yet seemingly in slow motion. Her light, lustrous hair swung gently in front of her emerald green eyes. Her glossy, parted lips froze in a look of demure surprise. It was then that Winifred realized her own mouth was hanging open. She shut it tight and cleared her throat before opening it once again, this time to speak.

"Nice haircut, Angela," she said, nodding to acknowledge the successful downplay of her unladylike gawking. "I see you're obviously doing something far more important than helping me take over the human world. Would you care to expl--"

Her attention suddenly turned to the other girl in the room. She was quite tall, almost elegantly so. She wore her hair in a large, chocolate brown bouffant with blonde streaks running along both sides. She was tracing her cheekbones with her slender fingers. Her mouth was half-open in shock, a look that was becoming increasingly popular in this one restroom.

Winifred leaned in and muttered loud enough to create an echo. "Who's your self-absorbed friend, Angela?"

"It's Shelley! See, yesterday I found a spell that made my hair short and gave me glasses, right? And everything was following a logical progression until I quickly pulled my glasses off. And then, this happened!"

In the time it took for Angela to say this, she had walked across the ladies' facilities like a runway model and punctuated the word happened with a twirl.

"So I tried the spell on Shelley to see if it was some kind of beautification spell, but it didn't do anything. Then I had her pull her glasses off. Like, real dramatic, you know? And... well, you can see for yourself how it turned out!"

The results were plain to see, though plain wasn't any way to describe Shelley now. But Winifred was having none of it.

"Preposterous!" she shouted. "I debunked the glasses thing myself some time ago!"* She then grabbed Shelley's spectacles from the bathroom sink. Shelley still gazed into the mirror, either oblivious or completely indifferent to Winifred's handling of her personal property.

Angela winced, making a quiet sucking sound through her teeth. "Ohhh, I wouldn't touch those. I think the glasses are the key to this spell..."

Winifred continued her rant unabated, shaking the folded glasses in Angela's face. "You're honestly going to tell me that a girl like Shelley can just pull off a pair of glasses like this--"

Now, in the time it took for Winifred to say this, she had placed the glasses on her face in order to enact pulling them back off. Her predilection for drama should have made the dramatic pull a cinch. Instead, the glasses began changing shape to better fit her face. Winifred's dark, shoulder-length curls receded, leaving behind a stringy mass of split ends that barely reached past her chin. The meticulous, bat-like points that were her trademark hairstyle now stuck up like a pair of cowlicks. Combined with the glasses, she now gave off a decidedly more owl-like appearance. Her fitted vest expanded into a baggy sweater, which tried but failed to conceal her widening posterior.

"Like this," she repeated, as she removed the glasses with little flourish. "Hm."

"Like this," she repeated more quietly, adjusting the glasses a bit before sliding them off.

"Thith..." she attempted once more, now with larger front teeth pushing out from between her fangs.

Angela could only stare, daintily covering her mouth. Winifred even seemed a little shorter now, although it may have just been her posture.

Winifred looked down at the floor and took off her glasses slowly, only to wipe them off with her shirt tail, which remained hanging over her plaid skirt. "Thee, I told you it doethn't work," she mumbled.




*see Underburbs, issue 9