Gloria Reynolds needed a smoke. Bad. A ciggy, cloves, weed... whatever she could scrounge up. It had been half an hour since she'd jumped off the stage at the Pussy Kat Klub and into this suburban nightmare, and she was feeling edgy.
The kids didn't help. She'd never had kids, never wanted kids... the guys she'd slept with over the years had been sleazewads, but Gloria was a smart girl; she always packed protection when she slept with a guy, and she was religious about her pills. She'd seen too many strippers throw their lives away on some jerk they'd met in the back of the club after both parties had had a few too many to drink.
Now, suddenly, she'd been saddled with a ton of kids. Well, three anyway. A teenage boy, a goth girl, and a pre-teen boy. Or at least, that was what they looked like on the outside; apparently on the inside they were a college girl, a footbal player, and a cheerleader, respectively. Gloria would have found that absolutely preposterous if it hadn't been the fact that she saw a middle aged woman every time she looked in the mirror.
She was looking in the mirror now. This woman needed help. When Gloria had jumped in, she'd been dressed in slacks, sandals, and a blouse. Frump city. And the woman had been wearing, like, no makeup. Gloria had dug through the woman's closets for something sexier, and at last she'd settled on a pair of short shorts and a camisole, along with a pair of pumps. And she'd found the woman's makeup stash and piled on the foundation and eyeliner. Now Gloria felt a little more like herself, though she still had to frown when she looked in the mirror. This woman was over forty years old, and she'd given birth to three children; that would take a toll on any woman. She had bags under her eyes, wrinkles forming on her forehead and around her lips, faint streaks of grey in her hair. Her skin was getting rough, and her tits sagged in all the wrong places. This woman, this "Jane" chick... she wasn't ugly. But she was clearly getting older, and Gloria hated that thought. The last thing she wanted was for people to think she was old.
And yet the "kids" all seemed to think that Gloria was old. It was probably because she looked like the mother of the family... and she guessed, in a sense, that she was. The kids wanted Gloria to calm them down, to take care of them, to figure out what was going on for them. But Gloria was only twenty-two. She couldn't have been much older than the chick in the teenage boy's body... Morgan, or whatever her name was.
And so she needed a smoke. Gloria felt that restless energy that always built up in her back and shoulders when she'd been too long without a cigarette. If she didn't get one soon, she was going to snap, and... and... well, she didn't know what she would do. She just hoped this family didn't have a gun.
Desperately, she pulled open every door in Jane Madison's bedroom. She had to have a pack of cigs around here someone. Everyone did. In drawer after drawer, though, all Gloria could find was clothing, underwear, assorted knick-knacks that probably only mattered to Jane. One drawer was totally empty. Another one had sewing supplies.
In one of the final drawers in the room, however, Gloria found something that interested her almost as much as smokes would have. Jewelery. Shining, glittering, golden jewelery. A whole drawerful. Gloria couldn't quite take her eyes off it; she had never seen so many jewels in one place. Jane didn't seem rich, but Gloria was poor; she'd never been able to afford shinies like this.
She looked up at the mirror. Jane's aging body stared back. There was no way she could go back to stripping in this body; Jane was way past her prime. No club would take her. And stripping, along with whoring... they were the only things Gloria knew how to do, the only things she'd ever done. If Gloria was going to be stuck in this body--and who knows, maybe she would be--she didn't know how she was going to be able to make money.
She looked back at the drawer of jewelery once more. Then she made her decision. Grabbing a couple of purses from Jane's closet, Gloria grabbed a handful of jewelery and threw it in the purse. Then another handful, and another, until the drawer was empty. Then she went around the room and lifted everything else that looked even remotely like it might be valuable. Then, checking the hall to make sure it was empty, she moved on to the next room in the house. The kids were out in the backyard talking... last she'd heard from them, anyway. So she had a little bit of time. But she had to work fast if she was going to do this. Room by room, she grabbed everything she could that she thought she might be able to pawn. And yeah, in the goth chick's room he even found a small handgun. She made sure it was loaded; if she had to use it to get out of the house, she would.
At last she came to the teenage boy's room. She looked extra hard in there; she knew this boy had to have some weed somewhere. No self-respecting seventeen-year-old didn't have a stash hidden under his bed. But, two Gloria's disappointment, all she could find hidden away was a stack of Playboys.
Until... until she laid her hand on what felt like a rock, hidden deep under the bed. She looked it out and turned it over in her hand. It seemed to shift and glow as she stared at it, and Gloria almost thought she felt a little jolt of electricity and she touched it. She didn't know what this thing was, but she liked it.
Tucking the stone away in her purse, she decided it was time. picking up her two fully-packed purses, she made her way to the garage. There she took out the car key she'd found among Jane's possession, got in the family's little sedan, and drove away from this freaky, squeaky-clean Pleasantville. She hoped she never had to look back.
