"Get back in here!" cried Gladys' mother from her front door. Like her daughter, Mrs. Brewer barely fit through it.
Gladys wouldn't look back at her mother. "No!" She flung away her glasses. "I won't need them anymore! I'm going to be beautiful!"
Mrs. Brewer was spellbound by the sight of her daughter losing sixty percent of her weight in sixty seconds. Gladys' clothes morphed to fit her new body. Now Gladys looked ... average. Neither skinny nor fat, not a one or a ten, but a five.
Gladys turned around to see Mrs. Brewer's astonished face. "Mom, I'm normal now!" Her mother was a little blurry. Gladys picked up her glasses and put them back on only to discover that they were now too strong. "Why don't I have perfect vision?" She looked down at herself. She now looked like hundreds of other girls at school. "I thought I'd become like Candy on TV. But I'm just ... ordinary."
Mrs. Brewer shook her head. "Dear ... if the sun made you look ordinary, what would it do to ..." She couldn't finish the sentence.
Gladys knew what her mother had meant to say. "... Pretty girls? They'd get ... prettier. No! I-I still might be the ugliest girl in school!"
When most people are tens, five is the new one.
