Gabrielle's Bully (Young Adult Romance) by Malek Doreen Owens

Author:Malek, Doreen Owens [Malek, Doreen Owens]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gypsy Autumn Publications
Published: 2012-06-04T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The next morning was clear, bright and cold. I slept in because I had been up so late, and was still wandering around in my bathrobe when Barbara called to say when she and Margie would pick me up. I got off the phone quickly, staggering into the kitchen for some coffee.

“Do you plan on getting dressed some time today?” my mother asked mildly.

I mumbled something in reply.

“Don’t let me disturb your rest, dear,” she said, leaving the kitchen. “When you wake up, there are some muffins in the bread box and I think Craig left one piece of fruit in the refrigerator.”

I drank two cups of coffee and then went to the powder room on the first floor to survey the damage. I looked in the mirror and groaned. I just wasn’t one of those people who could do without sleep. My hair stood up around my head like a nimbus, and the bags under my eyes made me look like Vampira. I took some of my mother’s cover stick from the medicine chest and rubbed that under my eyes, which was no improvement. I now looked like an escapee from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. No more midnight rendezvous for you, my lady, I told myself. I would be lucky if Heath, and everyone else, didn’t run screaming out of my path in terror.

I went upstairs and took a shower, letting the cold tap run on my face to reduce the puffiness, and drenching my hair with cream rinse to calm its wayward tendencies. When I was done I peered at myself in the mirror again, and was relieved to see that I more closely resembled a human being. I took two washcloths from the linen closet and went back to the kitchen, wrapping them around ice cubes and pressing them under my eyes.

I was sitting there, holding the makeshift ice packs to my face, when my mother came in with a grocery bag. She stopped in her tracks when she saw me.

“Good lord, Gaby, what on earth are you doing?”

“I have bags under my eyes,” I informed her. “I read in a magazine that this is what you do to get rid of them.”

My mother marched over to me and took the washcloths out of my hands, dumping their contents into the sink despite my wail of protest.

“That is such nonsense,” she said. “Bags, indeed. If you want to see bags, look at me at seven o’clock in the morning. I never saw a girl more insecure about her appearance, with less reason. You’re very pretty, Gaby, which you’d realize if you stopped trying to transform yourself into Daphne Morris, that overblown tootsie whom you seem to think is the Queen of the May.”

“She makes me look like a clothes hanger in a dress.”

“Ridiculous,” my mother said with precision, enunciating the word crisply. “In twenty years she’ll be going to Weight Watchers and you’ll be wearing designer jeans.”

“Oh, Mom, don’t start that stuff again. I don’t care about what I’ll look like when I’m forty.

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