Not Quite What the Witch had in Mind

            Even as a child, Aspen continued to disrupt my sleep. She was always on about being hungry or wanting a bedtime story or not having enough attention. I told her that nobody wants a clingy woman.

            After failing to get me out of bed too many times, she learned to become self-sufficient. Thank the watcher! I’d already spent enough time on raising her.

            It’s not as if getting herself to school was some huge accomplishment. The bus stopped right in front of the shed.

            While Aspen was off at school, I prepared myself. Calling men had never felt like challenge in the past, but holding that phone and thinking of Dustin, my hand started to shake. I had to quickly punch in the number before I lost all my nerve.

            From his groaning and need to ask who I was multiple times, I believed he was hung-over. Still, he accepted my offer to meet at the spring festival. “Yeah, that sounds fun. Who are you again?” I hoped that he’d cure his hangover with some hair of the dog. That’d be my only chance of getting someone like him to be interested in my old and hideous mask without an elixir.

            Miraculously, he beat me to the park. Perhaps he’d continued to have a wild night after work and woke up there. I know I’d had some evenings like that when I was younger. My father needed to pay off quite a few paparazzi to get most of those stories swept under the rug.

            I could tell that he somewhat remembered me when he stopped collecting eggs to stare with a faint trace of horror.

            I’d worked too hard on him to not fight. I refreshed his memory on the finer points of the previous night.

            I can’t imagine I’d have been as successful if I hadn’t spent all that time honing my kissing skills, so take that all the magazines who published stories about me being loose! At one point during our make out, he even pulled away and made eye contact. “Oh yeah,” he said with just a touch of a slur. “I remember you.”

  

            And then he dove right in for some more.

            Within a few hours I was introducing him to a haystack.

            I had such a good time with Derek that when he complained of stinking like hay after our romp, I invited him back to the shed to get cleaned up. I even generously offered to help him with it.

            He didn’t make any comments about my shapeless nightgown or my low-budget house. I enjoyed his company so thoroughly that I forgot about my curse for a few moments. And I nowhere near recalled when Aspen would be coming home. Let’s just say she received an eyeful.

            As did her little friend.

            As much fun as I was having with Daniel, time for work came and I knew I needed to get changed into my jumpsuit. He was kind enough to lend me a hand with it.

            I let myself get one more good look at his acceptable face, before letting him run out the door. Would he ever call again? How could he want something more than a day’s worth of fun from a monster like me? I knew the situation, and yet I couldn’t help holding out a touch of hope that I would see him again. All the years I spent touting to ugly little girls that they could be just as successful as me, I never once bought my own words. If Dequan could truly want me, then I’d experience firsthand how right I’d been. And maybe that was the lesson that the witch was trying to teach me.