3So I planned to get this up last night because yesterday in Australia it was Tell A Fairy Tale Day... And I thought this would be perfect for that occasion hence why I tried to get it ready in time. But I'm not very good with deadlines.
Thanks to my beta sparkles151092
Hope you like this, it's just a bit of fun :)
TOAD
When Bella was a little girl she went into the woods to play with her friend Jessica, who dared her to eat a mushroom from the edge of a pond. Not one to back down from a dare, Bella ate the mushroom to spite her friend and prove to her that she wasn't afraid of anything. Jessica couldn't believe that Bella would do such a disgusting thing and said "No boy will ever want to kiss you! Once I tell everyone what you did, I'll be the prettiest girl in school!"
From that day forth, marked the end of their friendship. True to her word, Jessica told everyone in their class what she had done and was teased and mocked by all the boys saying she had 'cooties'.
As Bella grew older and went through puberty, year by year she developed what seemed to be severe acne. Although, she began to realise that it wasn't acne that covered her skin and nor was it warts. So early one morning, before most of the town awoke, Bella's father took her to the doctor. He was most intrigued by her skin condition, but as he had never come across a patient like Bella, he didn't know and couldn't find the cause or the treatment for what was growing all over her body. Unable to help, he diagnosed her with what he termed "toad's skin" and sent them home.
Bella was so upset and ashamed of the way she looked, she tried every treatment she could think of to try and get rid of the skin condition. She washed her body with soap every day and scrubbed her skin raw until it bleed. She gave herself full body facials and even whipped up home remedies that her mother once made. She tried taking herbal medicine and then started using any kind of chemical substance suitable to use on her skin to somehow kill the growth and prevent it from getting worse; rash cream, betadine for infection, even wiped methylated spirits over her skin. When they didn't work she even went on the pill because she had convinced herself her hormones were only explanation left for causing her condition. But to her disappointment nothing seemed to work.
For the remaining half of her second last year at school, Bella began distancing herself from Angela, her only true friend that stuck around throughout her transformation. Even though it hurt her to do it, there was no doubt that she wanted to save as many people from the kind of humiliation she was being subjected to. She didn't understand why she was turning out this way but she didn't want to feel guilty about trying to keep her friends around knowing they were uncomfortable.
Everywhere she went, Bella felt on edge knowing that all eyes were always on her, staring unashamedly at her condition. If she felt this uncomfortable, then she knew beside her, Angela would definitely feel it too. She didn't want her friend to endure the residual ridicule just for sticking by her side. Bella knew deep down Angela was a very loyal friend and would try to stick by her through thick and thin because that's simply what best friends were for. But this was too much to ask of another person. A normal person that shouldn't be brought down by her misfortunes.
"Angela?" Bella said as they approached her locker.
"Hmm?" Angela turned and leaned against the side of her locker in acknowledgement of her speaking.
Bella kept her eyes down and tightened her hold around the books she carried against her chest, as if they provided her with protection.
"I don't want you to hang around with me any more." She said abruptly. Before Angela could say anything she continued on.
"I appreciate all you've done for me as a friend, believe me I can't thank you enough for that but it's for your own good."
She refused to look Angela in the eye.
"Bella.." Angela said it in such a hurt whisper. But she had to do it.
This was the best thing for Angela. She shouldn't have to feel guilty or like she let her friend down when she might have eventually stoped hanging around with her. High school is definitely a cruel place that could go down one of two paths. You could be part of the lucky few who breezes through with no dramas. Although more commonly you'd end up on the other end where it's the shit hole you had to endure depending on where you were ranked in the social hierarchy. If Angela had any chance of breezing through this time, it was certainly not by her side and Bella knew it.
"Please. Just go." She turned and twisted her locker combination into the pad lock on her locker.
The seconds past by until she felt Angela turn and walk away.
Even though it had been difficult for her to let Angela go as her only friend, she now had to deal with not seeing her father. They weren't close to begin with but it showed that he was uncomfortable and spent more time working than at home watching his football games. She knew he loved her but she was also glad that he wouldn't see her as she was.
At the end of the school year, Bella resolved that she couldn't stay in school any longer as her condition continued to progress each day and could not take the increasing pity and shame from staff, students and society. For her last year of high school, Bella home schooled herself; the memories of everyone as they stared and talked about her behind her back were just too much to bear. Not that it was ever really a secret, their whispered conversations could still be heard clearly as she passed.
Others bullied her by putting acne cream in her locker or placing jars of bugs and insects on her table in the cafeteria. Mostly it was the jocks and the pretty girls in school that tormented her the most. Of course it was the group Jessica inevitably ended up in.
One day she had had enough and in a rage she threw the jars of insects at them, which broke, sending cockroaches, beetles and pray-mantis insects everywhere. She stormed out and never came back while the sound of her fellow student's screams could be heard from the insects swarming all around them.
Though some people weren't as mean, they would just look at her in pity every time she walked by, remembering her once as the blossoming Police Chief's daughter.
On her eighteenth birthday, Bella was unrecognisable. She no longer looked human, more like an alien from another planet.
Although she was pale underneath all the ugliness, her lumpy skin was tinted with an array of shades of green, worthy of true camouflage in a rain forest. She could no longer stand to be the way she was and many times had considered ending her life, for she had no understanding of why something as terrible as this was happening to her. A girl, pure at heart and kind.
That day, Bella ventured into the woods behind her house and found herself upon the edge of the pond she once visited. The rays of sun were shining through the canopy of the trees above, which glinted onto the surface of the pond. The sight of the strange mushrooms beside it made her angry and she stood, and trod on them until they were a crumpled heap and kicked the remains in the water. She wished now that they had been poisonous instead of turning her into... whatever she was. She kneeled over the edge of the pond and caught sight of her reflection. The first thing she saw was the large moist lumpy skin which covered her cheeks and forehead, surrounded by varying smaller sized lumps that covered the rest of her face, down her neck and across her collar bone. The rest of her body was covered with clothing as it always had been when the lumps started to grow, too embarrassed to show any part of her skin to anybody, even to herself.
It finally looked as if it was the worst it could get. There was hardly any part of her body that wasn't covered in the lumpy bumps apart from the palms of her hands, the bottoms of her feet and other more... intimate places to her god awful relief! Not to say that they weren't still tinged green, but if that's all they would get than she wasn't very worried.
It was when she noticed her eyes, lips and tongue that she knew her transformation from a human girl into an ugly, human green toad was complete. Her pale pink lips were no longer. She raised her fingers in disbelief to lightly touch them. They still remained smooth and plump but were now green just like everything else. Her tongue in the same condition, but a lighter shade of pea green.
The reflection of her eyes was her final undoing. In shock at how her previous, deep pools of hazel brown no longer stared back at her, but the eyes of what she turned into. A ring of green surrounded an orb of black; the eyes of a toad.
Against her skin, the white outline of her eye almost looked like eye liner and if she pictured buying contacts for Halloween, toad eyes would beat cat eyes any day. If she imagined hard enough, she would look like the perfect replica of a toad in costume, except only it was one she couldn't take off no matter what she tried, it was permanent.
Although the likeness between her and a real toad were contrastingly similar, her mind still remained that of a human. She could still speak and think intelligently as a human, she still walked up straight instead of hopping around as toad and her tongue didn't have a mind of its own when there were insects around and stayed in her mouth at all times.
As she knelt by the pond, her phone beeped to signal she had received a text. She pulled back from the pond and sat back on her heels to retrieve the phone from her pocket. 'You have 1 new message.'
From: Charlie
To: Bella Swan
Happy Birthday Kiddo
She stared down at the message in her hands. She hadn't physically talked to Charlie in the last couple of weeks because of her appearance. So she stayed in her room the majority of the time he was home and he would stay at the police station for a few more hours every night leaving her a series of notes that he had work to catch up on. There was no doubt she was drifting away from her father, more than they usually were from each other but now it was only all the time, resulting in contacting each other when needed and still that was rare. She would clean the house, do the laundry and cook Charlie's meals during the day when he wasn't home. She felt like Cinderella, except ugly. No prince, no fairy god mother, not even fury animals to keep her company.
Who am I kidding? That's not even a fair comparison. Bloody bitch was lucky. I don't see a happy ever after in my future.
In return Charlie did all the errands out in public. Bella would write out a list of things they needed and he would get them for her. This also included buying tampons in the grocery shopping. The poor man, had to put up with such an awkward and difficult task, but it was necessary.
There was no doubt he felt guilty for not being able to do anything, Bella was his only child and she knew he would do anything for her in a normal situation like any father would. But this wasn't normal, not anything a father could expect, let alone know what to do about it. This wasn't even something Bella even knew could happen, she was just as much in the dark about this as he was. Though he did keep his promise not to tell Renee, she couldn't take the pity from her own mother, the way she fussed over her was ridiculous. As if the tragedy that Bella was going through personally affected her in some way and then the crying... heaven forbid that was only when she scraped her knee or broke her arm, somehow looking like a toad might push her mother over the edge.
So as she looked over the words her father had sent her, they only brought her more sorrow than joy today than they had on any other day. Tears gathered in her eyes and her lip trembled as all the pain and humiliation she was going through, finally came to the hilt of her emotional threshold. She took one look back down into the pond and cried to her heart's content. Letting all the feelings of being alone, being cut off from human interaction, and human affection come out in the sound of her cries and her tears unrelenting, rolling down her face.
What did you think? Leave me a comment, it'll bring me great joy.