Excerpt: Southpoint Academy

She opened her eyes a little bit and was met with the sight of so much glitter and pink that it made her want to gag. Standing in front of her bed was Lianne’s perfect double, a girl who curled her hair and strategically placed little strands of pearls and pink bows so as to make it look like a little girl had done it and wore a little pink shirt-dress with silver tights underneath and pink ballet slippers. Next to that mess stood another girl who was obviously trying to give Michael Jackson a run for his money with the costume she wore. Even looking at the girl gave Ritchie a headache.

She sat up slowly and gave Lianne a look of death, which the girl cheerfully ignored.

“Oh my gosh, did we wake you up? I’m so so so sorry! But now that you’re awake, what do you think of my beautilicious boots?” Lianne asked. Ritchie looked at the supposedly pretty boots.

“Well, they’re certainly interesting…” she said. In truth, they were probably the ugliest things she’d ever seen. Ritchie was a firm believer in the fact that UGG boots should never have been made in the first place, and that even though some shmuck in some foreign land had chosen to skin a llama, it didn’t mean that girls all over the world had to wear them. However, that being said, there was an art to the way that these boots were constructed. It was as though Lianne had tried to take one of the ugliest things on Earth and make them even uglier, which truthfully, Ritchie thought took some real talent.

“Oh, please,” Lianne said, waving her hand around in a circle for no apparent reason. “People always tell me that my clothes are interesting whenever they don’t like them. Tell me the truth, Ritchie! I’m sure I’ve heard much worse than whatever you think about these boots.”

“Alright, I think they’re hideous and that UGG boots never should have been created in the first place, much less worn, but these are so ugly that I would even wear them. That color is the color of the kind of stale cotton candy that no one ever picks out of the carnival vendor’s little stack even though he always puts it on top because it’s been sitting there for the past year and a half and his supervisor says if he doesn’t get rid of it, he’ll feed it to him up his butt. They remind me of my old cat Archie right before he died because he turned that color blue. That’s what I think when I look at those lumps of sorry excuses for shoes,” Ritchie said. As soon as she said it, she felt better. She also felt like she had snapped unnecessarily at someone who only wanted her honest opinion, but the feeling was fleeting, as Lianne clapped her hands and jumped up and down excitedly a moment after Ritchie was tone talking, as though it had taken her a few minutes to process everything that she said.

“Oh my gosh, you totally get me, don’t you? Like, they’re so ugly that you can’t help but stare at them until they start to look pretty, right?” she said. Ritchie stared at her incredulously.