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Beautiful
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A modern retelling of
Snow White. Songfic with Joydrop's Beautiful.
Rated: PG
Verse 1
Verse 2
(incomplete)
If I was beautiful like you
Oh the things I would do
Those not so blessed would be crying out murder
And I’d just laugh and get away with it too
Like you do
When I was five, I used to idolize my stepmother. Nadaii had married my father only one year earlier. The year I turned five, he got a promotion that took him away from home more than either of them had anticipated. In the beginning, Nadaii would try to make up for my father’s absence and spend all of her time with me.
She took me to the zoo more times than I could count. There were picnics
in the park every weekend, movies late at night, and don’t forget all the
shopping. The only thing that kept Nadaii from complaining overly much about my
father’s bad hours was his exceptionally large paycheck. If not for that, I
wonder if she would have forced him to stay home. How different would my life
have been if my father had never drifted away?
My mother had died when I was very small. She had been beautiful with
long auburn hair that shined so red in the sunlight many people thought she was
a red-head. I inherited her hair, and her blue eyes, and her tanned complexion.
It seemed that only thing I got from my father was his height. It was obvious by
age four I would be tall. These were the only features I got from my parents.
The rest of me was all my own. Even my own grandmother asked where my face had
come from.
Nadaii raised me the best that she could, but she never tried to be my
mother and she suffered for it. After I turned twelve, my father got another
promotion. This one let him spend more time at home, but it was obvious he’d
rather be traveling again. His lack of presence for seven years had taken both
me and Nadaii away from him. He didn’t seem to mind at all.
That year, the year I was twelve, was the beginning of it all. Nadaii
seemed to want us to be a family again, now that my father had more time. She
would schedule things for us to do, all together. The first time, we went ice
skating. My father spent most of the time on his cell phone. I had already given
up on our relationship, but Nadaii kept on trying. Nothing seemed to work.
After awhile, although Nadaii still hadn’t given up, her deficit of
progress began to eat away at her. Against her good meaning to, she became
harder and harder to talk to, even to be near. And at twelve, I didn’t want to
understand that, I didn’t even want to try. I began to drift apart from the
stepmother I had once idolized.
Now, there’s something you must know about me at sixteen and my
stepmother at thirty. I’ve never been exceptionally pretty. Like I said, my
face is all my own. Now, I’m not ugly… just, plain. This never bothered me.
But Nadaii was beautiful. Not like my mother, not like most women in America.
No, Nadaii is drop dead gorgeous. I always wondered why she had married my
father at eighteen instead of pursuing a modeling career, or even trying her
stuff in Hollywood. But I had never
asked, and Nadaii had never brought it up.
By the time I was sixteen, an unbridgeable gap stood between Nadaii and
I. She and I would never be as close as we once were, and we both knew it. The
small things that had happened four years ago had turned into so much more. At
fourteen, Nadaii had once caught me sneaking out after she had grounded me.
Nothing she could say would stop me, so she dragged me upstairs and locked me in
my room. She said it was for my own protection, that I could not be sneaking out
to meet boys or do drugs. I hadn’t been, but I nearly broke the door down
twenty minutes later trying to get out. All this while my father read the
newspaper in the living room, never once blinked an eyelash.
My beautiful stepmother who had once been my only companion had turned
into a witch, my most hated enemy. High school and my friends seemed to be my
only refuge from her. She took refuge from me in her bedroom, staring
motionlessly into the large, gold-gilded mirror that sat across from the foot of
her bed. I used to sit next to her on her bed and we would laugh and do our hair
and put on funny cloths, then get up and dance around, watching ourselves in
that mirror. But those good memories had faded. Now, with my friends, I referred
to it as her magic mirror. Smash it, as I longed to do, and she and her evil
powers go up in smoke. Poof. Just like that.