CORDELIA CUTS CLASS
This will be a continuing story. Please comment nicely!
"I am so not up for school today," announced dark-eyed Cordelia Chase, covering a huge yawn with long and perfectly manicured fingernails. The beautiful seventeen year-old was hanging with her friends Harmony and Courtney in the back row of the computer lab at Sunnydale High School, watching the losers do all the work.
"We should hit the beach," Harmony replied. "Or the mall." Always a copycat, the dimwit blonde faked a yawn just to look as beautiful and bored as fabulous Cordelia. As if!
"Yeah, well, shopping costs money." Cordelia frowned at the memory of her father screaming at her mother the night before. Dad said they were going broke. Cordelia was afraid of being poor, but she didn't do fear in public. She did anger.
And Willow Rosenberg was her favorite target.
"Hey, ugly face," Cordelia taunted. "Are you looking up how to be a loser on the internet?"
"Who, me?" Willow's dazed response only made the popular girls laugh harder.
"No, not you," the stunning dark-eyed beauty jeered. "I was talking to all the other flat-chested redheads with freckles!"
"I can't help how I look," Willow whimpered, close to tears.
"Well, there are spa treatments that remove freckles," Cordelia growled, stamping out just the tiniest feeling of guilt. "Why don't you look up a decent day spa on the internet? You know, one that's local, and not too expensive."
Willow was either stupid or desperate, because she actually did a search and came up with something. "Hey, Cordelia! It says here that Eternal Rest Spa just opened out on Route 155. All this week there's a complete massage/facial package for $49.95. But no freckle removal," Willow sighed.
"We should go, Cor," Harmony said excitedly. "We should totally cut class and go.
"Please," Cordelia waved her hand in scorn. "As if I would be caught dead at some local day spa." The other two girls looked disappointed, but Cordelia knew what she was doing. She couldn't admit to looking for bargains. Not ever!
Going it alone was different. Zooming down 155 with the top down. The sun kissing her perfectly tanned legs. The wind running playful fingers through her long, black hair. Cordelia Chase was a girl who had everything, and she knew it.
Why couldn't her life just stay this way forever?
It was a little spooky, how quiet and green everything was out here. Cordelia saw nothing but a lush emerald lawn that went on and on forever, and a shady little cottage near by. This place was familiar, somehow. It almost looked like . . .
"Oh, very funny, Willow. Ha ha ha, you freak!" Sending her to a cemetery was somebody's idea of a really funny joke. Well, somebody was going to pay!
"Can I help you, my dear?" A woman's soft voice came from the shadows nearby. She didn't look like a ghoul or anything. She looked like a rich old duchess in a Jane Austen movie. She kept out of the sun, but she wore a classy tweed suit and pricy pearls. Very little makeup, light on the perfume.
"I think I'm in the wrong place," Cordelia told her, with a nervous laugh. "I'm just the victim of stupid teenage prank. Someone told me this place was really a spa!"
The silver-haired duchess opened her blue eyes a mile wide. "But this is a spa! My name is Edwina Covington, and I just opened a small day spa here by the cemetery. It was the cheapest location available! Won't you please come in?"
"Oh, sure. I mean, I'd be delighted, Miss Covington." The old woman had turned the basement of her little cottage into a spa. How pathetic was that? There was a sauna, and a massage table, and a space for waxing and manicures and all the rest. It all looked fabulous. But the place was so tiny!
Just to make things even more ridiculous, the one person working for poor Edwina was a big fat Swedish woman the size of King Kong!
"Inga has been with me for many years," Miss Covington explained, as a skeptical Cordelia stretched out on the long, low massage table. "She has wonderful hands, but one woman can only do so much. Surely you know of other young girls who might enjoy working for us?"
"Well, I don't think anyone I know would want to come all the way out here, to a creepy place like this! Sunnydale's got enough problems with vampires . . . oh, that feels good." Cordelia stopped complaining as the big Swedish woman's strong, powerful hands began hammering away at her back.
"Vampires?" Miss Edwina Covington repeated. "But vampires aren't real, my dear." Her face changed, going all gnarled and hideous in the wink of an eye. So did Inga's.
"Well, they are so real," Cordelia insisted. But her eyes were closed, and the massage was making her feel marvelous. She didn't even notice when the fangs bit into her neck.
TO BE CONTINUED . . .