Cinderella

She sat up and looked around. The pumpkin, which had been a carriage minutes before her fall, now sat, demonic with a smashed-in face. A candle flickered from its insides, reflecting on the blood that dripped down her forehead.

What happened to prom?, Drew Barrymore asked herself.

Looking around, the high school gym resembled a gutted fish. Drew sat, helpless and bleeding, alone like Gepetto, in the belly of a forgotten beast.

Her transformation into a teen had been completed; the story she’d written for the Tribune had its close but no fairy tale ending. The corsage at her chest had yellowed into a shade that matched the sullen after-hours lights that cast a dimness onto the walls and bleachers of Mandy More High School.

Maybe I am old, Drew thought. She felt like the musky pages of a book that had gone uncracked and unloved for years. Her pages faded into a sprawling mess of patheticness in a school gym where she’d pulled back her wrinkles and hidden her true self to blend in with Steve Monroe and James Jobs and the other jocks. All just to feel accepted.

The time on her watch approached fifteen minutes after midnight and the shoes on her feet once again began to take on the shape of, not beautifully crafted Italian ballroom shoes, but fluffy, hole-ridden dog slippers. They matched the polka-dotted dress Drew had hemmed herself and rendered a stunning silk number, almost as if it’d been from the Spring Versace catalog.

Drew wiped her head.

“Child, I believe you partied too hard tonight,” Elton John softly offered up as he walked around from behind the bleachers.

She just remembered the feel of the bathroom tile. The cold blue that caught her body after Steve had humiliated her in front of the entire senior class. The pills Elton had given her were her last resort after an evening that ripped any hope of finding love straight from her grips. She saw her red hair swirled as she sank into the chemicals flowing through her body. That was hours ago.

“He didn’t love me,” Drew whispered, letting the words escape her and spill out onto the hardwood at Elton’s feet.

“Drew. Look at me,” Elton said, bending next to her. His soft hand with delicate fingers of a pianist graced her under chin.

Drew Barrymore raised her eyes to meet his.

“I love you, Elton,” Drew said.

He helped her to her feet.

Together they shuffled out of Mandy More High School and into the lonely, forsaken night. Elton turned to her as they stood below the mistletoe that hung at the school’s entrance.

“Drew, I’m gay.”