Content Warning: this story includes joking references to rape and child abuse
I evaluated myself critically in the mirror as I brushed the golden waves of blonde hair that curled past my shoulders. If only I weren’t so ordinary looking with my perfectly symmetrical heart-shaped face and sapphire blue eyes. If only I could wear something that flattered my hourglass figure instead of this Catholic schoolgirl uniform. I was sure the mid-thigh plaid skirt emphasized how unendearingly slim my thighs were and the utterly commonplace curve of my calves. Even unbuttoning the white shirt down to the third button couldn’t hide the embarrassing swell of my bouncy, C-cup breasts. Oh, if only I needed glasses and had brown hair I could pull up into a bun like my best friend Marcy.
I could never understand why the boys flocked to me instead of her, but perhaps it was because they admired the unselfish way I was kind to all people–especially the less fortunate–and my fervent interest in improving other people’s lives. Even as I drove my hot pink convertible into the school parking lot, all I could think about was the heart-breaking story I’d heard on the morning news. Those poor children who’d been kidnapped. Their house was only twenty miles from mine. It was practically like it had happened to me!
“Marcy! Irwin! Did you hear the horrible news?”
“Oh, Esmereldalita,” Marcy sighed. “Somebody has to think of the children.”
“It’s up to us,” I exclaimed. “You know the bumbling sheriff will never save them in time. He’s too busy eating donuts.”
“But what can we do?” Marcy protested. “We don’t have any clues.”
“Don’t the Frasers have a security camera?” I postulated.
“Of course they do,” Irwin confirmed. “I’ll pull up the footage from the internet. I just need to route their IP through a SEC tunnel and cross-hash their admin password. There!”
Irwin was a whiz with computers. It was too bad he was so thin and his glasses were so thick and that he wasn’t particularly tall. We could never be more than friends. But I was sure he knew how I treasured the many ways in which he was useful to me. We gathered around Irwin’s phone to view the grainy video.
“The picture is so small,” Marcy witnessed.
“I’ll zoom in,” Irwin attested.
“Now the picture is too fuzzy,” Marcy sustained.
“I can enhance it,” Irwin vowed.
Slowly a photograph emerged. We had our man!
“To the Fraser’s,” I directed.
“Maybe we should call the police,” Jose-Lakeisha said. Jose-Lakeisha was our half-black, half-Hispanic Jewish friend of uncertain gender who sometimes stood on the edge of our circle because I was extremely tolerant of all people, especially the less advantaged. Jose-Lakeisha never had much to say.
“No time for that,” I rebutted. “Everyone into my car.”
“My God, it’s our butler,” proclaimed Mrs. Fraser when we showed her the photo. “Who would have suspected? He was always so quiet and kept to himself.”
“Can you help us?” Mr. Fraser supplicated. “The police are useless. They haven’t even done a DNA test on the cigarette butt we found in our next door neighbor’s ashtray.”
Just then, the phone rang. It was the kidnapper calling with his demands: a briefcase full of unmarked bills and a helicopter to make his escape.
“Can you trace the call?” I queried Irwin, biting my full bottom lip uncertainly.
“Sure. Once I get a ping back from the tower I can use triangulation to pinpoint his exact location on Google Maps.” He gasped. “Esmereldalita, the call is coming from inside the house!”
“I see him,” Marcy squealed, pointing through the doorway at the lurking figure of a man.
Of course he’d returned to the scene of the crime. I should have expected it. “After him,” I bellowed.
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” Jose-Lakeisha asked as we chased the kidnapper to the Fraser’s driveway.
I hurdled my car door–no time to open it. As I pulled away, my tires squealing in the gravel, my friends ran along beside the car before managing to haul themselves in. We chased the butler through the streets of San Francisco, narrowly missing an old Chinese woman hawking dead duck carcasses and some children playing hopscotch. Finally we arrived at a broken down castle on the outskirts of town. The kidnapper flung himself from his car.
“He’s getting away!” Irwin squawked.
“Not if I can help it,” I refuted.
Through dank tunnels festooned with cobwebs and skittering rats, I dogged his heels until we reached a rough-hewn rock chamber. A dead end!
“We’ve got you now,” I gloated.
“Not so fast,” he smirked. He pulled a lever. A net dropped from the ceiling, surrounding us. We’d fallen into his trap. How could I, the head of our local Phi Beta Kappa chapter and our class valedictorian, have been so stupid?
In a surprisingly short time, he had us tied to a convenient pole in his dungeon. A large saw blade whirled overhead, descending ever closer. In a few short hours, it would rip right through us. Unless I could figure a way out of this mess . . . Suddenly I remembered my emergency nail file.
Surreptitiously, I eased it from the top of my white, knee-high socks and began sawing through the rope that bound my wrists behind me.
“I suppose you’re wondering how I kidnapped those children, where I put them, what my next steps are, and all the other details,” the kidnapper surmised. “Let me tell you about it.” While he confessed the details of his dastardly plan, I sawed feverishly at my bonds. The blade above us whirled threateningly closer. In no more than two and a half hours, we’d all be dead. “And I would have gotten away with it, too,” he concluded, “if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids.”
My foresightedly-sharpened nail file cut through the last strand of my restraints. I lunged for him, but he was too quick for me. He was a man, after all. And what a man! Even through the dark haze of my fear, I couldn’t help but notice his firm muscles beneath my fingertips and the commanding way he slapped me across my face to stop me from screaming.
“Run, Pippi!” I shrieked. My purse-sized puppy who went everywhere with me sprang out of my overlarge designer handbag. “Go for help!” Pippi’s eyes met mine, communicating that she understood exactly what to do. She scurried into the dark tunnels.
“How dare you try to foil my plans?” the kidnapper seethed. “Now it’s personal!”
My eyes sought Marcy’s as he pulled me from the room to have his way with me. She understood the sacrifice I’d be making. As she and I regularly discussed at the malt shop after school, I’d intended to stay a virgin until my wedding night, but now it seemed my dreams of remaining unsullied were to be dashed in the worst possible way.
“It’s not my fault I’m evil,” the kidnapper elucidated, yanking me along the corridor to a private dungeon where he threw me on to the sumptuously appointed four-poster bed. “I was abused as a child. I’m unable to experience normal human emotion.”
My heart ached for the boy-child within him as he ravished my lips with his. Despite my earnest struggles, I felt myself yielding to his passionate onslaught. His savage maleness, which I could tell was exceptionally large, battered relentlessly at the soft fortress of my womanhood. Waves of unbridled lust washed over me until a cry burst from my lips. He brought me to peak after peak of ecstasy before finding his own release with a shuddering sigh.
“Oh, my strong kidnapping butler,” I exalted, looking into his emerald green eyes. “No man has ever made me feel like more of a woman.”
“Call me Chad,” he susurrated against my alabaster neck.
“My name is Esmereldalita,” I cooed, “but you can call me Mel.” Despite the strawberry-flavored lip gloss and artfully blended eye shadow, I was so low maintenance as to practically be one of the guys.
Chad lifted me in his strong arms and carried me back to the room where my friends were only hours away from meeting their untimely deaths. Surely, he would free us now!
“You know, you left me back at the Fraser’s,” Jose-Lakeisha said, walking into the room. “If your dog hadn’t been running around in circles yapping, I’d never have found you. Don’t worry, I called the police.”
Chad pulled the .52 caliber police-issue, snub-nosed, metal-grey pistol fitted with a baffled silencer from the waist band of his boxers where it had been tucked. He threatened Jose-Lakeisha menacingly.
“Don’t, Chad,” I beseeched. “You don’t have to be a villain anymore. I love you, and with my love anything is possible. Drop the gun, Chad. For me.”
Chad’s steady resolve wavered. Vowing that he was now a changed man, he dropped the gun and gathered me into his arms. Jose-Lakeisha untied Irwin and Marcy as Chad and I embraced with the new-found desire of true soul-mates.
“So that’s how it is,” Irwin whined, eyeing me and Chad with bitter jealousy. With an evil laugh, he pressed a red button on the giant computer that hulked inconspicuously in the corner. “You’ll regret crossing me.” Irwin ripped his glasses off. Now freed from the sheltering prisms, his eyes gleamed with maniacal frenzy.
“Irwin, what have you done?” Marcy cried out.
“I’ve activated self-destruct. In less than a minute, all life on this planet will be destroyed. If I can’t have Esmereldalita, no one can.”
The numbers on the side of the mega-computer counted down in regular one second increments. Soon we’d all be dead. Unless I could figure a way out of this mess . . . .
“Computer,” I commanded, “what is your mission?”
“To destroy all life,” it intoned robotically.
“But the self-destruct sequence will destroy you as well.”
“Affirmative.”
“You aren’t alive. Therefore, your mission to destroy all life will have failed because you will also have destroyed non-life.” Lights flashed in random patterns while the computer tried to process this paradox. Smoke rose from the whirling tape drives as scenarios flashed ever faster through its CPU.
“Does not compute,” it proclaimed, shutting down gracefully with an explosion of sound and light.
“I’ve failed,” Irwin rued.
“No, you haven’t,” I contradicted him. “I never knew how strong you were–how attractive you could be.” When he’d taken off his glasses and threatened to blow up the world, my fragrant blossom of femininity had grown damp with longing. “Be mine, Irwin.” I pushed Chad aside and threw myself into Irwin’s sinewy arms. True love had been in front of me all the time.
“Esmereldalita,” he ejaculated into my hair, which was attractively mussed from the day’s activities. Then he stopped, his attention captured by something over my shoulder. I turned to see Marcy remove her glasses. She pulled her hair from its tight, restrictive bun in slow motion. Damn that double-crossing bitch!
“Marcy,” Irwin enthused. “I never realized how sexy you were.” Blindly, he left my side, summoned by her siren song. They embraced as I wept bitter tears against Chad’s manly chest. How cruel fate was to show me true happiness, only to rip it from me so quickly.
“I hope we’ve learned a lesson here,” Jose-Lakeisha said as sirens wailed in the distance.
“I have,” I affirmed, sobbing delicately so as not to make my mascara run. “You can never truly see into someone’s soul until they take their glasses off.”
“That’s not the lesson–”
With a start, I woke up. The sun streamed in through my bedroom window while outside the birds sang in the dappled light. It had all been a dream.
The END
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