***A modern, gender-swapped retelling of the classic fairy tale.***
Keefe Beatty is beautiful, but odd. With only his senior year to get through before he can finally escape his tiny conservative town, he decides to keep his head down and not expect...
Keefe met her in front of school just as she was dropped off by Boris the Maid.
In his infinite cheeriness, Boris grunted a goodbye at her and then took off, itching to get away from all the children crawling around. Andie grinned. If Boris had the choice, he'd probably have all people in the world younger than 25 capped. Young'uns gave him the willies.
Keefe approached, smirking. "Boris willingly played chauffer?"
"Well, Uncle Donnie has his reputation of town shut-in to protect," Andie said, "I don't have a license, neither does Mrs. Featherstone or Escher, Mr. Brambles is too damn old, and thus that leaves..."
"Mr. Sunshine," Keefe said.
Andie grinned. "I think that's half the reason the others haven't gotten licenses or Uncle Donnie doesn't leave the house much. We all love to torture Boris with stupid tasks. He gets so pissed he turns into a big hairy tomato, it's hilarious."
"Superb," Keefe chuckled.
"So did you get all the stuff taken care of?"
Keefe had told her he had to forgo their walk to school together because he had to swing by the fix-it shop to take care of a few things. He didn't say what those things were and Andie didn't push it. She figured his dad had screwed something up again and he was forced to clean up the mess.
"Hmm?" He said, his eyebrows rising. "Oh. Yeah, yeah. Just a small glitch, easily fixed. I got here earlier than I usually do."
Andie took his ease and almost buoyant mood to mean whatever the problem had been it hadn't been horrible. He was pretty good at masking when things bothered him, but over the last few weeks, she had learned to recognize a few signs that meant distress. She was glad to see he was fine, she hated when that flash of sadness that crossed his eyes.
"Anyway," Keefe sighed as they turned to head toward the school building, "back to Boris' jovial chauffeuring–"
But they were jolted by a high-pitched shriek: "KEEFECAKE!"
Andie jumped a little, but Keefe brightened, whirling around to meet the source of the scream. Peeking around him, Andie saw what had to be the tiniest kid she had ever seen skipping clumsily up to him.
"Osco!" Keefe threw his arms up above his head. "By Jove, Oscar Tenderfoot in the flesh, ladies and gentlemen!"
Judging by his proportions, Andie saw he was a little person, maybe only reaching about four feet in height. He had the long mid-back-length raven-black hair that was traditional of his tribe. Parted in the middle, it flowed off his head in two shiny straight sheets.
His widely-spaced, earth-colored eyes were humongous thanks to the Coke-bottle lenses perched on his bulbous little nose. The glasses overtook his square face, leaving his large mouth and small chin in their shadow. Even his rather prominent brow bone was masked by the ocular monsters. The only things they failed to shrink were his eyes, which were so abnormally magnified it was almost hard not to laugh at the sight of him.
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