WIP Wednesday: Midnight Friends: Photo Allergic

 

Free Use Image by Free-Photos on Pixabay

Midnight Friends

Photo Allergic

Claire Hart didn’t so much wish she were a babe as she wished she could be somebody’s baby, but she was sure that would never happen. The high school freshman was a plain, shy girl of medium height with a medium build who dressed in loose-fitting clothes and wore minimal makeup. She was glad that the raging acne and greasy hair of her early teenage years were now under control, but what she saw in the mirror still left Claire photo-allergic.

Claire had nobody that she considered a real friend. Ruth Andrews was nice enough, but she wasn’t someone that Claire could talk to about her thoughts on the supernatural world. Ruth was a good Catholic girl and thought that such matters were best left unspoken. Helvey Gray was a funny guy who brightened Claire’s spirits with his goofy jokes, but Claire certainly couldn’t imagine discussing the unseen world with him.

Charmaine Chaplin was so pretty that it made a hopelessly homely young woman like Claire physically ill to look at her, but she was a sweetheart even if Claire sometimes thought that Charmaine had let her brain atrophy because she never had to use it. Charmaine’s cousin Dorothy Lombardo was a big girl with sad eyes like a basset hound who may have envied Charmaine’s beauty as much as Claire did, but who had a dogged devotion to her effortlessly beautiful cousin whose naiveite sometimes left her in compromising situations from which she required rescue.

Claire supposed that it would have been all right to have pleasant companions who had no desire to look too hard at the world beyond the walls of sleep if it hadn’t been for the unpleasant individuals with whom she was forced to share her life. There seemed to be far more bad actors than well-behaved students at good old St. Charles Catholic Preparatory Academy.

Valentino Valley was a stuck-up jerk in theatre group. Claire developed a crush on him because he was initially nice to her, but when he discovered that he was carrying a torch for him, he turned nasty. Claire surmised that Val was probably being nice to Charmaine in hopes of getting in her form-fitting jeans and Claire was simply a secondary recipient of his fake friendliness.

Val’s butt buddy Guy Frank was a non-entity when he wasn’t around Val. Guy’s given name was a perfect fit, as he was That Guy who blended easily into a crowd. If he’d had the inclination, Guy would have been the perfect criminal mastermind because he had such a nondescript appearance that it would have been difficult to describe him. Helvey once said that Guy looked like a forty-year-old car salesman.

Helvey also said that Guy looked like a frog and Val looked like a pompous prince. Claire and Helvey giggled while drawing a cartoon featuring Pompous Prince Pompadour of Buttland and his sidekick, Frankie the Frog.

489 Words

This story was posted to these places:

http://www.naughtynetherworldpress.com

https://lbry.tv/@naughtynetherworldpress:d

The Icky, Sticky, Nit-Picky Legalese If You Please (Or Don't Please)


Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This work is the intellectual property of Naughty Netherworld Press.

Reblogging is acceptable on platforms that allow it. LBRY’s reblog function is called repost, which makes things confusing since reposting is considered a no-no on most platforms. It’s fine to share the post using the repost function on LBRY. It is not okay to copy-paste the material into a new post.

Sharing a link to the post is acceptable.

Quoting portions of the post for educational or review purposes is acceptable if proper credit is given.


I'm on a mission with no permission. You can support me on LBRY.

LBRY is a decentralized content marketplace. I price the PDF versions of my work at approximately half of the Kindle price because I receive the entire amount rather than a royalty percentage. 

You can get a free LBRY account through this link. You can earn LBC for viewing content on LBRY as well as from selling your content.

1 comment:

  1. Pretty is as pretty does. And in my experience those considered pretty OFTEN don't match their actions to their appearance.
    And a big yes on the unused brain thing. I have seen that more than once.

    ReplyDelete

I try to get comments published as quickly as possible. I have ADHD and anxiety and sometimes I need to work myself up to be able to respond to comments. I don't always reply to comments on my blog, but I do try to visit as many people as possible when I participate in blog hops. I share your work on the monthly Roost Recommendations posts at ornerybookemporium.blogspot.com so others can discover your work. I do read and appreciate your comments.
Sorry, the Captcha is back and this time it's staying. I was inundated with spam comments when I turned it off. I wish butt rash on all the spammers out there.

An Olive-Green Gown and Malachite Shoes #8Sunday #RainbowSnippets #SnipSun

    Genre: Poetry plus a supernatural coming-of-age story (vampires).  Buy Link: https://amzn.to/3vz8uXw   Publication Date: February 15, 20...